---
title: "Art Direction"
summary: "Ember-noir below, a heaven drawn in white ink above. How the game is meant to look, sound and read on the way up, and the rules that keep it readable with a screen full of monsters."
status: decided  # Decided in the design notes, not built yet
section: "Art Direction"
html: index.html
source: www/lib/sections.ts (SECTIONS) and the pages of www/content/art/
---

# Art Direction

*Ember-noir below, a heaven drawn in white ink above. How the game is meant to look, sound and read on the way up, and the rules that keep it readable with a screen full of monsters.*

Ember-noir below, a heaven drawn in white ink above. How the game is meant to look, sound and read on the way up, and the rules that keep it readable with a screen full of monsters.

- [Visual identity](../art/visual-identity.md): The look of the climb. Ember-noir in the deep, Romantic landscape in the world between, a heaven drawn white in ink at the top, and heaven's white on whatever a faction holds. Warm fire is the fallen's own colour throughout, and a horde of two thousand still reads at a glance. [concept]
- [Concept paintings](../art/concept-paintings.md): The paintings of Road to Redemption's new registers, the reference for anyone painting or modelling next. Where the fallen wake, heaven drawn white in ink, the three factions in heaven, their angels' true forms in the world, and Sereth head to toe. All concept. [concept]
- [Palette](../art/palette.md): The colour of the climb. Seventeen core tokens, three families that never mix casually (the fallen's Ember, the cold Tide, heaven's white), a light study for every stage from where you wake to heaven, and the proposed tokens for heaven and its factions. [concept]
- [Shape language](../art/shape-language.md): Six monster families, each readable as a black shape at forty pixels tall in a crowd of two thousand, and the shapes of heaven's three factions, their true forms and their troops, readable at a glance in a world without colour. [concept]
- [Look, sound and voice](../art/look-sound-voice.md): What is fixed about how the game looks today, and the principles proposed for how it should look, sound and read. [decided]
- [Target shots](../art/target-shots.md): The key art rendered by the real game client, the concept sheets its models were built from, how close the engine has come, and where each shot sits in the climb, from the deep to a proposed shot of heaven. [decided]
- [Shot 1: Ember in the Flood](../art/ember-in-the-flood.md): The spec of target shot 1, the deep-register reference: four fallen holding a pool of ember light in a flooded hall while a drowned horde presses in. What it shows, what it needs, and where it stands. [decided]
- [Shot 2: Dusk in the Vale](../art/dusk-in-the-vale.md): The proposed second target shot, for the daylit register of the world between: Hollow Ghouls wading up a river at dusk into the last green valley, the Tide's fog creeping in. [concept]
- [Shot 3: The Keeper of the Gate](../art/keeper-of-the-gate.md): A proposed third target shot, for heaven's register. Four fallen hold a small warm pool on the white court before heaven's gate while the keeper of the gate and his white dead close in, the embers the only colour in an inked, colourless frame. [concept]
- [Painting guide](../art/painting-guide.md): How the game's concept paintings and painted game art are made, all in one house style, the engraving, frozen from the style study. The tool, the frozen references for each register, the prompt rules for heaven and the factions, and the looks the paintings have settled. [decided]
- [Asset explorer](../art/assets.md): Every file the game ships, from monster models to fonts, in one app you can search, filter and sort, with each file's numbers read from the file itself. [in-game]
- [Style study](../art/style-study.md): The game's paintings drifted into two styles, soft painted concept art and bold inked comic. Three candidate house styles, each painted on the same four subjects. Alex chose the engraving, now frozen as the reference every new painting is made from. [decided]
- [Models](../art/models.md): Every 3D model the game ships, in a viewer you can turn and zoom, with each level of detail's vertex and triangle counts read from the file. [in-game]
- [The wardrobe](../art/wardrobe.md): How a character wears any combination of gear, one piece per slot, each piece its own file fitted to a base body, with a mask of the skin it hides. Working in the asset explorer; how it would carry into the game. [concept]
- [HUD art](../art/hud-art.md): Every piece of the game's interface art, grouped by kind, at the size the client embeds it. [in-game]
- [Textures](../art/textures.md): The photoscanned ground and rock texture sets the caves are made of, each with its colour, normal and surface maps. [in-game]