Summary
- How an improvised design element snowballed into a strange puzzle.
- The unexpected chain of reactions that weaved three titles together.
- A look into my design process for The Immortal John Triptych.
OK, It’s summer 2022. I’m making a house interior for my Renaissance-paintings-come-to-life style adventure game, Death of the Reprobate (one of three critically-acclaimed titles in The Immortal John Triptych) and I’ve ended up with more doors than I anticipated.
Fig 1 – Death of the Reprobate, Carpenter’s House (with screaming babies)
These games are made entirely from chopped up Renaissance paintings, so I can’t just remove a door – not without finding a matching piece of blank wall at least. But large areas of blank wall tend not to be the preferred subject matter of many artists.
I don’t want too many ‘corridor’ scenes because they make for annoying backtracking. And I don’t want too many loops because they tend to make navigation confusing. Also, I’m trying to keep this game small (that didn’t work out), so I’m now in urgent need of a dead end.
I have some on-brand garden/courtyard paintings in a folder called ‘village bits’, but I can’t find a way to stitch them together nicely, and they are full of bloody doors anyway, so I eventually give up and move onto something else. Maybe I go and painstakingly cut around every leaf in the silhouette of an attractive tree, or write a joke about frog’s butts, I don’t remember.
Six months later I’m aimlessly browsing museum catalogues again when I stumble across this beauty!
Fig 2 – Andreas Schelfhout, Binnenplaatsje (1820-1830)
But, Joe! 1820-1830?! That’s not a Renaissance painting! Well, yes, I admit I have been using the term ‘Renaissance art’ increasingly loosely, and at this late stage of development I have been forced to cast my net rather wider than initially intended. But look at it! Clear boundaries either side, a nice open floor area, a potentially petable dog! It even has a stable style door similar to the one exiting the previous scene… The gods have truly smiled upon me.
It will need some work though. The woman kind of has her back to us, and she is performing an action I can’t easily animate in a loop, and the boy looks like a dickhead, so let’s get rid of them. And let’s open up that door and pop a background musician in there while we’re at it (every scene in the game has diegetic music).
Fig 3 – Death of the Reprobate courtyard scene in progress
Getting there, but the scene looks a bit empty now. And I didn’t do a great job of patching that gap where the people were, so I need to find something to fill the void. I need something big enough to cover the bad patch job, but ideally something nice and easy to animate. I scroll through my “Use Me” folder and find a man in his wife’s dress, angrily wielding a large stick. It’s funny, but a nightmare to animate. I find a creepily over-sexy Adam and Eve by Hans Baldung. Again, very funny, but it’s too tall to cover the bad patch work. Finally, I move on to my “stuff” folder and stumble across this wonderfully rectangular, mercifully static bull.
Fig 4 – Jacques Raymond Brascassat, Study of a Bull (1850)
Now we have a scene. It’s time to see if we can add some interaction, The Immortal John Triptych is meant to be a game after all. The obvious first step is to see if we can get that pump working. I’ll turn the handle around so we can access it more easily, and try my best to chop some bits of river together into a passable running water animation.
That’ll do! But… Wait a minute… look at the angle the bull is standing at… its butt is… what if I just flipped and tinted that water animation…
Oh dear. I have made myself chuckle. Now I have no option but to write a puzzle involving a bucket full of pink cow excrement. The rest writes itself. Of course I’m going to let you feed the bull. Of course different food will produce different colours of poop. Of course I’m going to let you collect the poop in a bucket and refer to it as a bucket of milkshake and make you feed it to one of those screaming children in the previous room. There is literally nothing I could have done to prevent any this happening. I didn’t want a bucket full of pink BS in my video game. You certainly didn’t. But the artwork has spoken and I’m merely it’s humble conduit.
The Immortal John Triptych, for better or for worse, with my most sincere apologies, will be available on XBOX August 27. Wishlist it now.
The Immortal John Triptych
Akupara Games
☆☆☆☆☆
★★★★★
The Immortal John Triptych is the ULTIMATE anthology of the Joe Richardson games. Four Last Things, The Procession to Calvary, and Death of the Reprobate are brought together under one glorious sun with never-before-seen deleted scenes, updated language parity across all three titles, an expanded soundtrack by Eduardo Antonello with new original recordings, manual saves for Four Last Things, backflips in The Procession to Calvary, and a button to trigger a superfluous trumpeted fanfare whenever you need to celebrate. Embrace the absurd, the profound, and the sweet soothing aesthetic of the Renaissance in The Immortal John Triptych.
Immortal John is dying. A holy war has ended in chaos. Sin itself demands reckoning. Three interconnected tales unfold across a world built from Renaissance paintings and Classical music, where the ridiculous and the profound collide.
Help locals with their daily tasks, only to find the Devil lurking in the shadows. Chase a tyrant across kingdoms while assisting inept magicians and negotiating with God Almighty. Navigate sin, death, judgement, heaven and hell, all topped with a cherry of gleeful flippancy.
From quiet countryside kindness spiraling into madness, to holy vengeance wrapped in absurdity, to cosmic philosophy delivered with a wink and a nudge, The Immortal John Triptych proves that the most intelligent thing you can do is embrace the utterly ridiculous.
