Sometimes you go into a talk and expect a step-by-step guide to success, only to stumble out even more confounded. That's one way to describe a talk on the last day of 2026's Develop: Brighton by Gerben Pasjes, an art director who previously worked on indie titles Deliver Us The Moon and its sequel, Deliver Us Mars.
His talk was about applying a first principles approach to art direction, referencing a principle described by philosopher René Descartes, who famously wrote, "I think, therefore I am." The idea of first principles is that if you were to break down all preconceived notions or influences, you would arrive at undeniable fundamental truths. It's an idea that can be applied as a way of arriving at a game's art direction that is unique to itself.
Of course, once you bring in a French philosopher from the 17th-century Age of Enlightenment, it doesn't mean you're necessarily going to get a clear one-size-fits-all solution, which is precisely the point. But these were ultimately the key points I took from Pasjes.
You can follow Gerben Pasjes on ArtStation.
1. Every game needs its North Star
When you begin making a game, it's usually not just about one idea but a holistic vision of what the game is about, so it can answer fundamental questions that often come up in a pitch meeting. This is often referred to as the game's creative pillars, or its North Star.
An example goes back to Pasjes' past work on Deliver Us the Moon as a concept artist and then Deliver Us, Mars as the art director. "Our core pillar was to make the player feel like a real astronaut. And so, any creative decision made in any given discipline had to feed back into this idea."
2. Games are made up of three loops
A very useful framework for thinking about games is their loops, sometimes termed micro, macro, and meta. Pasjes translated this for the art director's perspective as "what does the player see, from second-to-second, minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour."
Taking both Arc Raiders and Skyrim as surprisingly comparable examples, he continued, "These games use a similar local density, because you're walking around in both with a human walking speed. Our asset density per square metre is tuned around this speed."
The major difference is that Skyrim's map is much larger, which means more art effort is required to create variety with the same biome, whereas in Arc Raiders, more art effort is spent on creating zone transitions.
3. Understanding game design is important to understanding game art direction
Game development is a collaborative process, but that doesn't mean each discipline stays in its lane. It's why Pasjes brought up the 3C principle (character, camera, and control) as a way of scrutinising a game's vision.
For example, the camera is how players perceive the world, but there's more than just deciding on a perspective, like first-person, third-person, side-scrolling or isometric.
"The third-person perspective in Gears of War makes you feel extremely heavy, but our same third-person perspective in games like Marvel Rivals is super snappy," said Pasjes. "Then we have perception. What the player feels at 60 FOV is much more claustrophobic. At 90, they have much more peripheral vision, but now we have to tune our environmental compositions around that."
Control, or game feel, meanwhile, is often about how responsive and satisfying inputs are, but it often means how much art effort went into making the simplest interaction interesting. "In Diablo, you spend 90% of the time left-mouse clicking, but they spent an insane amount of effort to make left-mouse clicking very compelling and engaging."
4. Validate art choices with design as early as possible
Prototyping is always important to ensure the art and design are aligned. One example Pasjes had experienced involved working on a game where letting players vault over the environment was added during production.
"Suddenly, we had to look at our entire environment pipeline again, and make sure that all of the desks, all of the chairs, all of the fences and railings were fitting neatly into a specific height arena", he explained. "The player uses their knowledge of what the character can do, and then tries to navigate the environment based on what they think they can do. If suddenly a fence that they think they can vault over isn't vaultable, it takes them out of the immersion."
In other words, it's important to have answered questions at concept and preproduction phases before moving into production. "We want to avoid building the rails while the train is moving."
5. Lean into constraints, but break them where you can
If a first principles approach should theoretically mean not sticking to the default methods, Pasjes nonetheless recommended smaller teams to use engines like Unity or Unreal as intended, "Because spending your small team on resources building custom technology is not always a good use of your time if you're under pressure."
That doesn't mean just making identikit games. With just two environmental artists working on Deliver Us Mars, Pasjes said they developed a versatile modular kit that was used for all of the game's levels. "We just applied very different lighting scenarios to bring out very different colours," he explained. "We also needed a destroyed version of this barn we built. But instead of spending more time developing a whole new set of assets, we just exported it into Blender, ran a physics simulation, and then paused it. And, ta da, we had a destroyed version of our house."
Ultimately, if your team can lean into its unique constraints, you will hopefully ship a game that is deeply unique to the studio. "You built this game from the ground up, and this, by definition, is all yours."
