Astrologaster (2019) is a narrative title, set in 16th century london, developed by Nyamyam Games.

My task, initially, was to focus on visual development. This was a gradual process over many months, with the main priority at the start being to search for a direction that was faithful to the Nyamyam pop-up book style established in Tengami, but also reflect the subject matter of the new project. Experiments, like those below, focused on creating a convincing cut-out appearance, as well as looking into various options for the overall look and texture.

I approached some of these ideas differently. For example, in the concepts below, I designed a series of simple props and building blocks to help create some consistent designs more rapidly. (Only a small example of props shown here).

We were deciding on whether to move forward with a hand drawn, or cleaner, more precise aesthetic. The two concepts below were done for an early demo, but both directions would be abandoned, partly due to what was achievable in the engine, but also because of the character designs.

The look for the characters was partly developed from work completed before I joined the project. At this point in development, it was critical that we started to address the characters and how they look when placed in a scene. It took a while to settle on something everyone was happy with, but it was an important step that helped start to focus in on the final direction for the environments. Below shows a select few, along with an expression sheet for the player character, Simon Forman.

Back on the environments, the idea was to reduce detail and make them more abstract, to create a more cohesive and distinct look, that worked with the characters. Finding the work of Agnes Giberne helped a lot and I experimented with the style of illustration found in her books

Taking some of those ideas, I began to adapt the environments we had been developing. At this point I was still very set on the idea of having more dynamic lighting, even though this wasn’t going to be feasible in the final game

We decided to push the abstract/minimal approach further, with a more limited palette and simpler lighting. Things clicked into place after a while and we felt confident with this direction.

After some work on other areas, like textures, UI, marketing material and other bits and pieces, we took a fresh look at the scenes that had already been completed and decided that a redesign was necessary. These are the final concepts of the four main scenes.

I also got the the chance to work on some 2D fx towards the end of the project. These were quite basic and simply animated in Photoshop, but we still achieved the desired result in most cases. A couple of examples shown below.

Recommendation Letter

Forman’s Casebook