Method to the madness

I try to find ways to push game design and narrative thtough my art. Ideally, a player should be able to tell where they are in the story simply by looking at their screen. The characters around us scale in importance with relevence of the story, take different shapes and sizes depending on the threat, and radiate music that reinforces all of these qualities. In the Illustrations above, I tried to balance a relativley simple premis. Enemy progression in a design "family" in 4 stages. My approach to such a task is to first work on motifs. If the player is going to be seeing these characters again, what do I want to clue in that they might be related? Asking myself what the player is feeling is a crucial step at all times during this process. I'd then look towards the game's interaction/ combat systems/ How does this enemy threaten the player? For these mosnters in particular, I wanted to immidietly give the player the knowledge of how this monster was going to kill them. In tandem with the combat system, I'd create a design language of these enemy archetypes. This would tie back into a general design motif for a family. I like to look at biology and pragmatic evolutionary theory for monstrous designs. We know how they will kill you, general design motifs, and the evolutionary adaptions that each design evolved to serve those roles. While this sounds complex, most of this happens during the design process. These questions run through as I sculpt silhouette, plant key facial features and anatomy points and pose. Usually, the idea or concept that's the coolest or gets the biggest reaction out of or clients leads first, and I combine all these factors into a hierarchy of ideas that results in these intersting and unorthodox designs. The benefit being: Players feel a level of intentionality and thought that feels rewarding to experience. And, If it's really well connected, then the best result is that players don't notice a connection at all. immersion is achieved.