For game director Oliver Granlund and concept artist Louis Stillace at Envar Studio, working on the visual language of Witchspire has tested invention and creative collaboration while drawing on a range of valuable aesthetic influences. I caught up with them to learn more about how they approached working on the co-op and single-player open-world witch adventure.
Oliver, what are your key responsibilities in the role of game director for Witchspire?
Basically, on some level, I’ll be involved in most major decisions about the game – whether that’s the art, whether it’s gameplay, or even technical decisions – asking, ‘What are we doing?’ and setting a direction for what we’re making and what the choices are that we need to make all in the same direction.
What that means day to day is very different. It means a lot of playtesting. It means being in meetings with people, giving that overview, and acting as a compass. I’m not in every decision or every meeting, but overall I’m setting that compass direction, pointing to north.
Louis, can you give us an insight into your role on Witchspire’s visual development work
I was a junior when I started working on Witchspire. I was mostly focused on environments, but also assets. Now I’m a senior concept artist working at Envar. I’m in charge of working closely with the 3D artists, the animators, VFX artists, and game designers to provide a vision that fits everybody’s needs.
I’m doing illustrations, and I can do very detailed illustrations, establishing shots, or very quick concepts for anything that’s visually important in the game, from a magic wand to a castle.
Do you still work with pencil and paper at any point as you develop ideas and then take it into digital tools?
Louis: I do it as a hobby. I love traditional art because I come from a fine art background, and that’s something that definitely helps me in my work. I love to do it outside of work. But within the process of creating a game, working digitally is just so much faster.
What influences contributed to your work for Witchspire?
It’s a blend of my inspirations, the other concept artists’ inspirations, and the art director’s inspiration. I knew from the beginning that Genshin Impact was a big influence. I was a big fan of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Elden Ring, which influenced me a lot when I played it during the process of making this game. But also, very different things like movies or traditional arts.
So that had a huge influence on my paintings when I was working on Witchspire. Some artists have a style that fits so much for the game. On my side, I think I had a darker style that, in a way, I had to adapt. It was a challenge to bring this light-hearted energy to the project that we were looking for. In a way, it made me make a lot of progress in my own work as an artist.
How does colour work as a storytelling element in Witchspire?
Louis: We knew that we wanted to push the [colour] saturation quite a lot. We wanted to have this intense and bright feeling for the game.
Oliver: Before we started making the biomes, we started with the idea of an ascending colour, like a colour script. That’s harder to do in a game than a movie, because a movie has set frames. We could do general vibes, and you can see here sort of like choosing certain colours based on the easier biomes, the medium biomes, and so on.
We started concepting after that. Both character and environment. When we started, we wanted a certain vibe. Sometimes it was just the colour was slightly off. I had creatures where they felt slightly too hostile because the shade of green they had read as poisonous, not friendly.
Louis, is there a specific environment or asset you’ve developed that you feel particularly satisfied with?
I was very proud of an establishing shot that I did. It’s supposed to be a massive picture with a very wide angle, and you’re basically supposed to see what’s going to happen in the world: what’s waiting for the player as they’re going to progress into the game. So I did this shot development very early in the process.
We didn’t know what the game would look like, so I had to imagine the type of environment it would be. It was the opportunity for me to design the big spires and a big monument that you can see in the game. I designed it at this moment when I was doing the establishing shots to have a point of interest.
This was a task that I really enjoyed, but it was made in a short amount of time, like two or three days. When we first started working on Witchspire, our team was three concept artists, and we were focused on environments. Every day we were doing different speed paintings, so it could be one, two or three maximum environments per day.
They are super quick, and it was very hard in the beginning. But with time we learned how to be quicker in the process and more efficient. And my establishing painting is one of the pictures that started resonating with the artists’ vision and the team. So we just decided to keep it, and it felt very satisfying as it was one of the first pieces that I created.
Could you talk us through the typical pipeline for developing a character or creature in Witchspire?
Oliver: After the 2D exploration for a character or creature, that’s where 3D gets your hand. We’ll be doing the rough blockouts, dragging them in engine and asking, “Does the size feel right?” One thing you’d be surprised about, depending on what kind of camera you have in a game, is that things are going to feel very different.
So, for example, if you have a creature and they’re supposed to be large and menacing in first-person gameplay, they can look like a realistic wolf. That’s going to feel pretty menacing. But in third person, they feel very small and tiny, so you might have to up the size by a factor of two just to get the same feeling. That’s something we had some back and forth on in development.
Then, at the end of the process, we have the final render where this is all animated. The VFX is flowing from their bodies, and all of that is coming together. I don’t know how many creatures I’ve counted, but this has happened for, at the very least, 50 creatures who had an initial concept, and then iterations, before we eventually landed on an approved creature design.
It’s been like a pipeline where, as soon as one step is done, as soon as concept artists are happy, you’re moving on to blocking them out and getting them in-engine. As soon as the 3D art is done, you’re rigging that, and then you’re jumping onto animating it. And to work with so many creatures, you definitely have to have a pipeline in place where that handoff goes quickly.
Louis: What I liked about the process that we used in the team was the back and forth between 2D and 3D, regarding, for example, a house and its architecture. It all starts with a sketch that’s not detailed at all, just to have the feeling of it. It then gets implemented into the game, and a 3D artist modernises it, but it still lacks various details. If it feels good with a very minimal approach, the artists are then asked to do a paintover of it.
They’ll take a screenshot of this 3D model and then refine it, either with a line art or painting, to add more details. Potentially, it can go back and forth a lot of times like this, which is super cool.
Oliver, what has been a particular challenge of developing the visual language for Witchspire?
I think one of the hardest challenges for this game is that we’re going into a market with lots of different games already, and we want to make something familiar, but also something that was different.
One of the first things we had to consider was that we don’t want to look like that other creature-collecting game. That was the first thing. A lot of the initial concepts maybe looked a little bit too simple with flat colours, and so we instantly said, “If we’re making a creature collector, it needs to be our own.”
One of the things that I pushed for was, “Let’s make sure that these feel more like real creatures that you could find in a forest.” The second one was, “Add more detail.” We’re not going for realism, but we want to make sure that they have a certain level of detail where they’re not going to be these flat, simple shapes.
These are wonderful, but that’s not what we wanted to do. And that I’m very proud of, and I’m very thankful for the artists’ work. We’ve done a lot of work building this world, and my hope is that we get to expand that.
I would like to see which parts could continue, be it in another game or other media. We’ve put a lot of groundwork into this, and I think it’s something that truly resonates with people. I hope that we get to see more of it.
