Ben Ee, Art Director talks concepting the visual world of Malys

APRIL 29TH: KICKSTARTER DEV LOG

Note: These posts were written for the Kickstarter campaign that ran April-May. Some information may be outdated or incorrect.
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G'day mate! I'm Ben, the Art Director for Summerfall Studios and the guy in this fun, unedited photo:

You wanna know how you make something like Malys come to life visually - let's dive in, shall we?

Art Direction
So, my background is illustration. There are lots of different types of art directors. Some are tech heavy, some might be really into animation, but because of my background, I'm really into compositions, how a picture is framed, because to me that's one of the most effective ways to convey story and, more importantly, feeling - something I personally care about quite a lot. With Stray Gods, I had this touchstone of a marble bust in neon light. This idea of this incredibly ancient thing being touched by this very new thing was the line I wanted to walk. It wasn't about the image, but the feeling it created that helped me communicate with the team. 

Exorcisms
Personally, when Dave brought up exorcisms to me I was like hell yeah - I love the idea of exorcisms. I really love the aesthetics of them - the storytelling. This idea of extreme good and extreme evil is really appealing to me, and of exorcisms handling dark and twisted things about what it means to be a person. What fascinates me about exorcisms in terms of emotional depths is this idea of human psychology and trauma - how do I create art that creates a sense of fear that isn't just, oh no, it's a scary demon? What do we fear as people? 

Noir Meets Western
One of the things that really inspired me the first time David introduced the project to us was this concept image or still from Dark City. It was all warm blues and greens, this lone person in the street, huge towering cityscapes that are really haunting. That inspiration along with this idea that Malys was almost Noir meets Western was really fascinating to me. Those genres are kind of closer than you'd expect - the lone characters who are defying authority most of the time, they don't necessarily play by the rules, they do what it takes or what they feel is right. This idea of the renegade - a saviour without being a superhero - was something that drove me. 

Demons
One thing I have a bit of a pet peeve against is when demons are represented as this big, buff, humanoid guy, and he's punching you. What I like about the horror I watch is that often the monster is a manifestation of an unresolved personal thing, or a fear. So our demons are not humanoid - they're weird, and alien, and I had to ask myself what is terrifying?

Evangelion does a great job of this with their Angels - they're designed in a truly eldritch way: abstract, unfathomable, and truly overwhelmingly more powerful than you. It needed to feel truly terrifying, the way an ant might see us. Tying that existential feeling with concepts of fears as that very form of abstraction - things like phobias, the idea of being in chronic pain, dealing with chronic depression, those concepts when manifested into creatures. How do we scare ourselves without it being a jump scare? It's frightening because it's real, and haunting in that way. Humanity has such potential to suffer, but there's so many flavours of how people can suffer in the day to day, and how do you pull that apart artistically?

A page from our art bible, showing an Angel from Evangelion.

Early Concepting
A lot of the time I use music to guide me. Malys has two playlists at the moment - some of the songs get really dark, but it's about me finding those feelings. Can I put myself in that mindset in order to communicate that same feeling through another means? This isn't necessarily useful for the team though - it's more trivia than direction because music can be so subjective. One song, 'Housofpsychoticwomn' by Ethel Cain has this droning sound and someone saying I love you over and over for 13 minutes. If I was like, your homework is to listen to five hours of non-stop screaming, or that song - I don't wanna be that kind of boss.

I started looking into this artist Dave McKean, who uses quite traditional art styles to make really abstracted visuals - I love the idea that while we're looking through Noah's eyes, we've got this sort of black, heavy, rain and shadow feeling, but in the world of demons, the demons are kind of chaos personified. The form of a thing is almost fluid - gets lost and found again, almost like it's made of accidents. That art style really captures the mood and emotions, which is something I really prioritise when it comes to our games. We never had to say 'demons are about emotions', because chaos and emotions link hand in hand. I don't know about all of you, but I can't logic my way out of a strong feeling in my head. Even if I know it's not true, it's still how I feel. Demons to me are the overwhelming sensation of something that's beyond what you can logic away.

A painting by Dave McKean from the Nitrate Paintings exhibiton in 2012 - Un Chien Andalou

Art Bibles
First step is communicating all of that to the team, which for me means collecting a whole bunch of images together, putting it in an art bible - calling out what you want to do or don't want to do, or here's the general vibe of what we should do. We had time to do some research, so we watched The Exorcist and stuff like that, and I did a lot of telling the team like 'Pay attention to this moment - isn't it interesting that in all the exorcisms we watched nature was involved, windows were smacking, pain was involved.' Finding all the threads that connect those things together is part of the research to me. 

An example of some of the early painterly style references I put together in an art bible.

The art bible only gets us to the start though - then the questions the team bring me helps me find things out as well. They start asking 'what about this' or 'would this work' and I'll go into my head and I'll be like, does it match this oppressive feeling that I'm trying to tell? Does it match the story I'm trying to achieve? By story, I don't mean David's narrative written story - I mean the emotions, the emotional journey of the visuals. Sometimes it's yes, sometimes it's no. Maybe it borrows the aesthetics in a cool way, but does it say something about fear? Does it say something about pain? It's a very nebulous method of being an art director. For me, feelings are the language that I love to use. I know I'm not really good with my words. That's why I like to paint. It's because I can show people.

Early demon progression concepts.

Challenges in Concept Art
The biggest challenge when concepting anything is to make something unique that's also actually achievable. You have to be just unique enough so someone can still understand the game at hand. Early iterations of Malys, we tried this concept of yourself on one side and the demon on the other with this fracturing, and while it was unique, it was just overwhelming and too different. It didn't feel right. I think that's the thing that’s more important in games than say film or books is that you have to, at the end of the day, still wordlessly communicate, because the game has to make sense. 

An example of our early 'shattered' display proposal, which was just super overwhelming for a player.

Sometimes I'll think too much about all our constraints, but often this makes me innovate. I'm not shooting for a AAA studio with our one person VFX team, you know? Some of the advice I was given as a director was like, you learn to choose your battles on which hill do you want to die on, and I don't have many. For me it's about ensuring there's a foundation that stays the same - the ground is stable, even if what we build on top of it changes. I don't mind when I'm building more bricks on top and someone says you can't put that there for a good reason, because I can build around it. 

Malys
What's been so special about Malys for me is that with Stray Gods, I was kind of filling out a house. We had a narrative structure that Dave had on hand that framed things. With Malys, we've been building the house together - we get to throw back and forth 'it would be cool if we did this' and find the path together. With this game, I get to just go wild. I get to walk this line of how do you unsettle people without terrifying them, and create discomfort that comes with a sense of relief. 

There's a level of power in games like this where you're wielding a sword and slashing your way through enemies, but one of the things I established in my head early on is that a human is no match for a demon, no matter what. What makes Malys different from everything else is that instead of the power fantasy of fighting things, you're the one doing these rituals and stuff in order to save someone. There's a purpose here to the discomfort - there's a hope in it. Your actions are actively making their world better. That might feel like a subtle difference, but it's a key difference of turning it from the hero fantasy into a hero of a different kind. You don't have to kill the monster to defeat them, and in fact you probably can't, but saving someone from that monster is enough of a hero moment. You're not killing demons, but prying their fingers off of someone to save them is enough. I think that allows us the space to get really messed up and horrifying with our designs and concepts, because it's not just a brutal slog through a hellscape, there's a core concept of hope to balance out the darkness, built in to the very foundations. These exorcisms aren't about killing demons, they're about saving hosts.

Thanks for reading! Drink water! Miss you already!

Ben