pot that all my previous artwork suddenly got a whole new lease of life. Old characters became touching points for new game ideas, which for an artist like me who has many characters was extremely exciting. Dom: When we started I was a research scientist at the University of Bristol. Making a game was a dream of mine though and I spent a lot of time making tiny prototypes and learning how to use Unity. I’d never really worked on anything with an artist before, so I didn’t have much experience relevant to what I’d need to do to get Tom’s art into the game. I guess we just learned it all on the job.
WHO WERE THE ARTISTS ON THE PROJECT AND WHAT DID THEY BRING? Tom: I am the sole visual artist of Silt and therefore I drew or painted everything in the game. I brought my imagination to the table and hopefully our small team didn’t mind having to make sense of that! Our sole animator/rigger extraordinaire Anton did an amazing job at breathing life into everything in the game. Also, his early diver animations helped us get the funding needed to start this whole project, so he brought a lot to the project. We had some wonderful VFX artists help us on the special effects also, which was great to see them sprinkle their magic dust on my drawings. This really helped with the immersion of the world and I don’t think it would be the same without their input.
Last but by no means least our sound designer and
composer Nick, his mastery is prevalent throughout and we were very lucky to gain his talents on this project to really make it the oppressive and disturbing game that it is. I’m still finding new sounds now after many playthroughs. The level of detail in his sound design is astounding.
WHAT WERE THE ART TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES USED DURING DEVELOPMENT? Tom: Initially, everything started as watercolour concepts with pen and ink. I scanned these textures/drawings and parts of them (mainly the hatching techniques) became the foundation textures for everything. After a while, purely due to speed, using digital Wacom tablets took over. From then on I used Photoshop and got to grips with using libraries so I could ‘compose’ the shots with the individual items I had drawn (twigs, chains etc). This was a different way to design for me but seemed to work out well. I could block out the shots quickly as a PSD with premade assets and hand- draw anything new for that area in between the gaps. As I am a
traditional artist at heart, I made sure I added additional crosshatching/hand drawn shading and
August 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 59
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