Home and Hearth

We're so happy to report that Mandrake has sailed past 50,000 wishlists, and counting. It's wonderful to share our game with you and see your enthusiasm in return! Today, we present a conversation between Erion Makuo, Senior Artist, and Chris Gardiner, Narrative Director, about her work using characters' homes as a vehicle for story and mood.

CHRIS: Erion! Tell us who you are and what you do! 

ERION: Hey! I’m a fantasy illustrator and make art for books, Dungeons & Dragons, and Magic: The Gathering. For Mandrake, I paint the character illustrations and some of the environments. It’s my first time working on a video game.

CHRIS: I find that last bit very difficult to believe, for reasons that will no doubt become clear in this conversation. I wanted to talk to you about your work on characters’ homes in Mandrake – particularly the interiors, because they’ve turned out to be such rich, playful tools for storytelling.

In fact, your work is so dense with detail that we should use an example from the game and talk about the specifics. 

CHRIS: So this is the home of the Iveys. For context, Rosen Ivey is the village leader and beekeeper, and she lives in this house with her shepherd husband Able; her young son Thomas; her older daughter Kenway; Kenway's betrothed, Coll; and Rosen's elderly mother Metheven.

CHRIS: That image is obviously the result of an enormous amount of work. But when “Draw the interior of the Ivey house” lands in your Jira task list, what information have you been given to start work with?

ERION: In this case, (Art Director) Toby had already done some concept art for the exterior of the house, so I already had a general shape to work with. 

I also read the profiles for all the characters who live there, so I know the residents and what they use the house for. For the Ivey family, it’s where they are together, which means we need a hearth, a table, and, logically, a kitchen. Rosen and her mother make candles, so they would have a place for that too. 

We’d also been developing an architectural style for Chandley, which I wanted the home to reflect.

CHRIS: Let’s come back to the architectural style, because I want to ask more about that when we zoom in on some details. Before that, what does the early part of your process look like? How do you get started?

ERION: Lots of visual reference! I looked at as many pictures of historically-appropriate homes as I could, and Toby had taken a load of reference photos of some on one of his holidays that I used.

Then I look at the space, at what people would use it for. Where would they store their food? Where would they keep their clothes? Where would they put their shoes? You have to think of it as a real house, and how to make it feel lived in.

CHRIS: 'Where would they leave their shoes?' is such a great question. It’s practical, but it’s also intimate. Do you ask yourself lots of questions like that?

ERION: Yes – you have to find ways to remove the initial analysis paralysis. A big white space is too much, and you can’t process all the possibilities. Limiting your brief helps. The more limited you are, the more creative you have to become. So I try to limit myself with the characters this home is representing. A practical character might not care for decoration, so you have to find some other way to express who they are.

The other thing that questions help do is fill out the negative space. When you’re looking at a picture of an empty room you need a lot to fill it. So I do a lot of… not peoplewatching, as such, but being conscious of my own habits. People tend to do pretty much the same things. They leave their shoes by the door when they come in, to avoid getting mud in the house. In the Ivey house there are five people for every dinner – it’s going to be busy, so they keep the plates on the table for convenience.

Similarly, both Able and Kenway are shepherds, and have crooks. They just lean the crooks they’ve been using that day near the door when they come in, but they have extras because a good craftsman has spare tools. And those spare, maybe nicer, crooks are mounted neatly on the wall.

Because you’re asking those questions, the details have meaning. There’s something worthwhile for the players to discover, there. I’ve heard voice actors say they ask themselves questions about their character and their life to inform their line delivery, too. 

CHRIS: Writers do it, too. It’s interesting how similar our early process sounds! And were there any problems or surprises when you were working on this interior?

ERION: The initial sketch was much smaller and more confined, but I had to increase the size several times. There’s five characters to represent, and who might be physically present in the space, plus the player needs to be able to navigate it easily. 

We also iterated a lot on the placement of the structural support. Originally, I drew load-bearing beams through the centre of the house to support all the weight of the roof, but we had to cut them to make pathfinding better and to make the interior read better at a glance.

CHRIS: In the eternal battle between player experience and architectural health and safety, health and safety always loses.

ERION: In fact, we increased the size of the interior so much we then had to go back and blow up the exterior, too. The exterior is smaller, but we ‘zoom in’ when you go inside. But the difference between inside and outside felt too much, so we had to bring them together a bit.

CHRIS: Great – let’s talk about some nitty-gritty details, now, and your thinking behind them.

CHRIS: A while ago you mentioned Chandley’s architectural style – are these multicoloured bricks part of that?

ERION: Yes. Chandley is in a land called Penhallion. Older, grander Penhallion architecture is mostly only seen in ruins now. It’s inspired by art nouveau, uses lots of flowing lines, and its buildings had roofs of green metal. The more rustic, more contemporary architecture in Chandley still uses flowing lines, but fewer of them; their roofs use wooden shingles instead of metal, but they still paint them green.

My idea is that these multicoloured bricks, which are found in several houses, were salvaged from older, fancier buildings and reused.

CHRIS: I also like how both forms of Penhallion architecture contrast with the other architectural style in the region, which was imported by a powerful distant culture. That’s all soaring, white marble with copper detailing and water features. Ideally, players will be able to tell which culture and period a building is associated with just by looking at it.