The Art of... Silt
Creepy aquatic puzzle adventure Silt is the debut title of Spiral Circus Games. Co-founders Tom Mead and Dominic Clarke relive their maiden voyage in game development
Tom Mead, art director and co- founder, Spiral Circus Games
Dominic Clarke, tech director and co- founder, Spiral Circus Games
HOW DID THE IDEA FOR SILT’S VISUAL DESIGN COME ABOUT? Tom Mead: For many years I have drawn my fears. I had built myself a career of drawing anthropomorphic characters based on my deep-rooted childhood fear of Beatrix Potter’s ballet. After a while I wanted to focus on different subject matters and, after a nerve-wracking experience in a particularly murky shark cage, I realised that large empty underwater spaces (with predators circling) was another fear that I wanted to explore! For a while after that I was painting my characters in large empty undersea voids, and that’s when I met my co-founder Dom. He was a research scientist at the time wanting to make games, and I was a fine artist looking for my characters to be animated, so after showing him the series that I was working on, we decided that would be a fun subject matter to explore - and we haven’t looked back since!
WHAT WERE YOUR VISUAL INFLUENCES AND REFERENCE POINTS? Tom: H.R. Giger’s work has always been a big influence, in terms of surreal aesthetic touching points. Ernst Haeckel, the German zoologist and illustrator, also became a really useful resource. His drawings and shape ideations
58 | MCV/DEVELOP August 2022
sparked a fair few creatures in the game. A lot of the other stylistic influences are ones that I have always had for any of my art, so people like Shaun Tan, early Tim Burton, Junji Ito, Edward Gorey and the sculptor Pierre Matter, to name a few, were indirect influences on the general aesthetic approach. To state the obvious as well, Mother Nature certainly helped! There were plenty of times when the creatures of the game didn’t need to be made up as the real-life versions were bizarre enough on their own!
HOW MUCH OF A DEPARTURE WAS SILT FROM YOUR PREVIOUS WORK? Tom: Neither of us had previously worked in games, so I would say the departure was huge! I had studied 2D animation at university many years ago and seeing my characters animated was always a massive buzz. I always knew I would go back to animation in some way, however my art style didn’t fit into the 2D commercial world at all.
After years of seeing my characters static in fine art and illustration I got lucky with a chance encounter at my old art studio and games became my primary focus.
But I’ve never felt like I left the art world behind. The games industry is such a melting
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