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Black Heaven Vision Board

To help aid in art design for the game, I created some Pinterest boards for characters and costumes! You can check out some of the key reference images below.

Note: these images are not official art for the game–they’re just inspirations.

No-Eyes

One of the key sketches of No-Eyes, the necromantic antagonist of the game. He wears a black, eyeless helmet with human teeth embedded in the jaw.

Key Appearance Traits: close-fitting black robes with high collar and silver buttons, smooth, eyeless helmet, leather satchel, white gloves, no exposed skin, 6’0, emaciated

Occupation: Necromancer and scholar

Personality: No-Eyes is irreverent, charismatic, and entirely without morals. He sees other humans as amusements or puppets, and is highly adept at twisting them to his own ends. His humorous and often devil-may-care attitude is carefully cultivated to disguise his true intentions.

Ru

Ru is one of the three main romance interests. She is the main character’s tutor.

Key Appearance Traits: Medium-length blue hair and bangs, large glasses, willowy, 5’10


Occupation: Scholar/teacher (Physical regeneration specialty)

Personality: Ru is shy and bookish, but her passionate side shines through when tackling a puzzle or difficult problem. She’s widely recognized as a leader in her field, but her relentless work ethic has isolated her and made her even less comfortable interacting with people.

Keywords:Gentle, empathetic, obsessive, anxious

Leathe




Leathe is one of the key romance interests. She is a skilled surgeon and one of the protagonist’s classmates.

Key Appearance Traits: medium-length, red, curly hair tied up in a messy bun, freckles, roughly 5’8

Occupation: Student (Artificial vessel specialty)

Personality: Leathe is charming, clever, and an unapologetic queen of drama. She loves to gossip and play with people’s hearts, and can appear callous and shallow. However, her outward persona is mostly a façade, which hides her deep insecurities and her wariness to trust others.

Key words: shrewd, witty, manipulative, flirtatious

Izagi

Izagi is one of the key romance interests. She is a martial artist and one of the protagonist’s classmates.

Key Appearance Traits: long, straight black hair, fit and toned, 6’0

Occupation: Student (Physical augmentation specialty)

Personality: Izagi Ito is focused, disciplined, and confident, but beneath the surface, she’s still struggling to rein in her chaotic emotions, which range from fierce competitiveness to anger over her past. For her, martial arts are a way to tame her own mind.

Key words: fierce, confident, disciplined

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Meow Wolf and the House of Eternal Return

This past week, I visited my old college roommate in Albuquerque and went on a road trip to Santa Fe to check out Meow Wolf, which is home to something called ‘The House of Eternal Return.’ The building contains a full-sized family house, complete with a living room, porch, kitchen, and bedrooms, but scattered around the house are books, planners, and pamphlets that give clues about the residents, including Lucius Fox, who is the founder of a Scientology-like cult called Positive Mechanics, which is concerned with travelling through dimensions. It’s essentially Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, but built to scale, with a refrigerator that leads…somewhere else.

While wandering around the house, I found some interesting in-world texts, including a will, a PowerPoint presentation on a computer about Positive Mechanics, and a cipher for an unknown language, which allows you to decode a nearby message in a picture frame. Most interesting of all was a tapestry titled the ‘Technomancer Manifesto,’ which can be heard spoken aloud here.

Here are some of the pictures:

 

The House of Eternal Return is hands-down the coolest place I’ve ever visited, and not just because it’s a funhouse filled with occult B.S. It’s the kind of weird, incredibly ambitious project that you always hear people talk about as some ultimate goal, but inevitably never gets off the ground due to practicality. But Meow Wolf and the HOER is not only real, it exceeds all expectations and all goddamn definition. It really is a playground for the imagination, and mixes dark storytelling with mind-bending experiences and the sheer joy of exploring–anyone who’s been there knows the stuff I’ve described is only one-tenth of the experience. It makes me happy that a place like HOER exists, and it inspires me to do something just as weird and ambitious.

You can check out the website here.

 

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Five Years Worth of Sketches: Ritual Magic, Death Masks, and Helmets

This weekend I finally started digging into about 5 years worth of sketches and thumbnails doodled in the margins of my school notes. The majority of the sketches are for helmets, masks, and faces, but there are some symbols and ritual magic designs.

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Most of the helmets on the left are meant for Redcaps, which are elves that have warped their bodies into killing machines. Their helmets usually have a grinning skull motif, like death masks. On the right are robes, designs, and a mask for a necromancer. The almond-shaped mask design is one of the oldest masks I made.

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Most of the designs on the left are ritual hook designs, surrounded by symbols. I’m not sure what I’ll use them for yet. The other symbols scattered around the page are for necromancy. On the far bottom-right corner is a sketch of the god of death, Erroth.

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I’ve been experimenting with creating a language of symbols for magic based on Chinese or Japanese pictograms. The two blocks in the center and left are some automatic drawing examples. On the right is a design based around the mask of the god of death.

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More helmets on the left, and death masks on the right. The mace in the middle is a take on the Gae Bolga, the famous weapon of Cuchulain, the Irish hero.

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These are some assorted drawings of faces, including the skull-like face of a necromantic character and the alien-like neck and head of Absurdity, which is an embodiment of chaos.

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“Secrets” by Joel Clapp

Hey, so I just bought a 12×16 piece of art from my friend Joel Clapp, titled “Secrets.”

secrets art occult triangle lab

Joel has done some concept art for my stories, including the Grinning Man helmet, the sketches of Oroboro and his scary-ass smile, and the city of Ibiza, from “Hypnotica.” Here’s what he has to say about the piece:

“I was inspired by two of my favorite painters, Zdzislaw Benksinski and Chet Zar. Their apocalyptic tones and surreal, fleshy creations have fascinated me for a long time. I tried to capture a feeling of ruin and foreignness and focus on a lone entity, with the secrets of the fallen civilization locked away within its fortress-like skull. It all really started with trying to emulate my favorites, really.”

I’m gonna hang this on my wall, right above the bloodstains. You can check out more of Joel’s work here.