The making of the belly of a beast

HOW THE SAUSAGE IS MADE DIGESTED 

Today I want to do a little behind the scenes on designing stuff for REZ PLZ. 

When we decided the third chapter of the game was going to be a reference to one of my favorite film tropes: The Fantastic Voyage.

Fantastic Voyage circa 1966, what a time to be alive (

 This trope is whenever the protagonist gets shrunk down to microscopic size and is injected into the body of a being. This is a trope that’s been used in countless scifi shows, The Magic Schoolbus, Gears of War, and even as a season finale in Archer. 

In our case, the boys don’t shrink, but instead get swallowed by an impossibly large beast. I started doing some sketches for the environment and its inhabitants: 

Because I’m the only one creating the art assets for the game, I keep my sketches fairly loose, as I just really need a rough to go off of when I start laying it down pixel by pixel. 

Realistically, everything would probably be the same kind of pinkish red organ colors, but that’s not very interesting. To break up the visuals, or creature not only has some green scales on the inside, but is also being inhabited by a parasite that is corrupting it from the inside with spiky tumors and what not. All in all I come up with a few tile sets all working together: 

The inhabitants of This giant parasite ridden dragon are called the Gourdkin, a people that had their entire village swallowed up by this crazy monster. It’s unknown how long they’ve been in there, but they’re a resilient people, building their new home inside of the dragon. Here’s some early sketches of the gourdkin:

And here’s the finished pixel versions:

Ok, I think that’s enough for now! You’ll just have to see the rest in the game when it’s released! Hope you liked this peek into my sketchbook!