The Art of... Card Shark
Illustrator and animator Nicolai Troshinsky takes us through the visual design and creation of Devolver’s unique 18th Century adventure game of cards and cads
HOW DID THE IDEA FOR THE GAME’S VISUAL DESIGN COME ABOUT?
Nicolai Troshinsky
The visual design is a mix of things I have done for other projects adapted to the needs and requirements of Card Shark. Being a game set in the 18th century, it was obvious that it needed to evoke the baroque and rococo painting of the time. At the same time, it’s a video game so I wanted it to feel modern, closer to a french comic-book style, with characters drawn in thick lines and a lot of details suggested rather than drawn. It is also not a realistic game, it reinterprets history and portrays a fantasy of being a cheater, so it made sense to stylise and exaggerate. That’s why I wanted huge ceilings, absurd proportions, impossible perspectives and massive chandeliers. The paintery aspect meant a lot of texture without contour lines for the background. That meant that having black outlines for the characters was a simple way of making them stand out.
The flat fake perspective was a deliberate choice to simplify the game, characters can only walk left and right in a straight line. It was also obvious that the camera will never move since all the action happens at a table. This meant that a static background was the only chance to build the world, as
62 | MCV/DEVELOP July 2022
players will not go around exploring it. Because of this, characters had to be relatively small on screen, leaving a lot of space to build the environments around them.
WHAT WERE YOUR INFLUENCES? Baroque and rococo painting, architecture and costume design, movies such as Barry Lyndon and The Night of Varennes, illustrators such as Štěpán Zavřel, animation filmmakers such as Yuri Norstein and Yefim Gamburg.
HOW DIFFICULT WAS IT TO BRING ALL THE STYLE ELEMENTS TOGETHER? Not difficult in that it did not require much trial and error. Things started to work almost immediately, mostly because I was building on past experience as a book illustrator. The process was not that much different from making an illustration for a picture book. The difficulty was more about how labour intensive it was.
IT SEEMS THERE’S AN INTENTION NOT TO BE TOO OBVIOUS IN TERMS OF THE LOOK OF THE GAME - TO CONFOUND, TO A DEGREE. WAS THAT THE CASE? There was an intention to be playful. The architectural features are historically accurate but their proportions are exaggerated. There was also
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