A fresh approach to video game art

Gregorios Kythreotis draws on his architectural knowledge and a wealth of comic influences, including Moebius, to help develop the look of Sable

Gregorios Kythreotis draws on his architectural knowledge and comic influences to help develop the look of Sable.

Sable is an upcoming open world game set on a mysterious planet. The player controls the young Sable, who explores her surroundings while learning her people’s history.

The game is developed by Shedworks, a two-person indie studio. We made a game that focuses on environment exploration, rather than combat or survival mechanics. This was partly because my academic background in architecture means I can tackle environments relatively quickly. However, because we wanted the game to have a great sense of scale we knew we couldn’t adopt a realistic rendering approach. So we decided to look at other sources for inspiration: Belgian and French ‘ ligne claire’ comics from the likes of Moebius; the works of Studio Ghibli; anime such as Akira; and the Archigram and Japan’s Metabolist architecture movements.

We started work on the game in 2017 and now work with a few fantastic collaborators, including writer Meg Jayanth, musician Michelle Zauner, sound designer Martin Kvale, and artist and animator Micah Holland.

For this promo image we wanted to introduce Sable, while teasing places she could explore in the game.