black background). “In the end we settled on black figure
for readability, but I took a lot of design cues from the
more complex styles of the red figure art,” McGibney says.
The team actually experimented with rendering the
game on a pot “with curving rotating edges and all that”,
says McGibney. “This was obviously needlessly
complicated, but there’s still some visual effects we held
onto.” One of these is the vignetting at the corners of the
screen. “Another was the subtle normal mapping applied
to the screen, which dynamically moves with the in-game
light sources to give a clay-like texture to everything and
helps reinforce the style a bit more.”
Although characters were abundant in pottery, he
struggled to find references for environments. “At most,
there might be a tree or small part of a building,”
McGibney says. “I ended up combining the geometric
patterning and interpreting real-world plants, statues,
landscapes, and architecture. It was a bigger design
challenge than the characters were by a long shot.”THE PERFECT SOLUTION
Color was another challenge. Expanding the color palette
to include blues, yellows, and greens helped differentiate
areas, and little pops of color could help highlight objects
and other characters. Apotheon also diverges from the
pottery in that its scenes have some visual depth—a
foreground and a background separated by tinted
fog—which helps with legibility.
I ask why games don’t use the style more often—it
would seem a natural fit for 2D platforming projects. “My
only speculation is that many games want to create their
own vision of things (as we did when we first started the
project),” says McGibney. “Sometimes they might overlook
the perfect solution right at the root of their inspiration.”RIGHT: The finished
game’s art style is
instantly
recognisable even
though it needed
some tweaks to be
player-friendly.
BELOW: The earlier
idea was futuristic
space soldiers
meets antiquity.A
lientrap’s Apotheon illustrates its ancient
Greek story with imagery influenced by
black figure pottery. But before becoming
a 2D platformer clad in the motifs of
ancient Greece, Apotheon was an open
world sci-fi project set on a space station; a story of
godlike beings manipulating humans from on high.“Eventually we cut away the space
parts and just decided on making a
game about Greek mythology itself,”
says Alientrap cofounder and creative
director, Jesse McGibney. “By that
point, it seemed like a no-brainer
to use the art style that was most
associated with those myths; black
figure pottery.”
For a while McGibney was torn
between black figure style (black
figures on a red background) and red
figure style (a later style with red on aAPOTHEON
Ancient art by way of sci-fi gods
Pen and Paper Gaming
FEATURE