I’m pleased to continue our team introductions with two of the more recent team members—which is to say, they’ve been working on Fallen Gods for many months rather than many years. Hailing from the Czech Republic and Argentina respectively, Jan Pospíšil and Marcelo Orsi spread our team even farther across the globe!
I first crossed paths with Jan way back in 2018, not long after he began work on Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind, when he generously offered to contribute some art to Fallen Gods. Since King of Dragon Pass was one of the important inspirations for Fallen Gods, and since Jan’s art is (and was) phenomenal, it was a wonderful offer to receive! Unfortunately, conflicts on both ends kept intervening, and it wasn’t until late 2022 that we finally were able to connect, and not until late 2023 that Jan had time to dig in more. Now he’s taking on one of the critical pieces of our art: the illustrations the player sees in the game’s many different endings. He also contributed a couple of event illustrations.
Marcelo and I met on Twitter, as his striking artwork for There Is No Light and Inscryption kept catching my eye (as well as James’s). It turns out Marcelo is as much a fan of our games as we are of his art, and we were all glad to find an excuse to collaborate. (Marcelo’s also helping on Carbonflesh with James.) Very quickly, we bonded over our shared love of Borges (an Argentine author who influenced Primordia’s characters and worldbuilding) and asado. So far, Marcelo has worked on assembling a lorebook for Fallen Gods from other artists’ material—an assembly process that benefits from Marcelo’s excellent artistic skill—and we’re looking forward to sharing The World of Fallen Gods soon. We also are looking forward to additional contributions from him in the game itself, such as beautifying the items, and in its manual.
Both Jan and Marcelo have amazing galleries that shouldn’t be missed!
Jan Pospíšil
Mark: You’re best known for your work on Six Ages, another game that is grounded in mythology, folklore, and history—but a different set of influences for each. What steps did you take to make your Fallen Gods art capture the different setting?
Jan: I played the game for a bit and looked at the existing art a lot. The overall visual language actually felt quite familiar, the challenge was mostly in adjusting my tools and process to produce similar-enough results. I definitely simplified my drawings compared to Six Ages, which was in a way quite liberating. There isn’t as much need for a ton of culture-specific details and other than the god there aren’t many recurring characters. Then it was a matter of keeping the color palette more muted than I did in Six Ages, as well as leaning into strong lighting setups rather than flat local color.
Mark: Initially, you did a pair of event illustrations for Fallen Gods before taking on the ending illustrations. Are there any differences in approach you’ve taken to the endings?
Jan: The endings definitely require more flash and drama—using both lighting and composition they need to feel impressive and final. It obviously depends on the nature of each ending, but the player should typically be feeling big emotions while looking at the painting. We meet strong important gods, prevail in battle over terrible monsters and see bright bridges of light shoot up into the heavens—the art needs to deliver that spectacle. In other cases we get just a landscape that has to communicate a certain mood, or half a character facing away from the “camera” or cut off by deliberate composition that needs to get their relationship to the god across.
In the end I think I just planned a bit better before I started and tried a little harder while I painted. ;)
Marcelo Orsi
Mark: What first attracted you to Fallen Gods?
Marcelo: I think the atmosphere of the game was the first thing that hooked me in. It was something beyond just “retro,” which would imply something created now that wants to emulate something old... no, this game felt as if it was actually created in the past, in a period where I think games were truly magical. The art, the music, and the narration just transported me to that awesome era.
Then, the gameplay loop sealed the deal for me: it wasn’t just the atmosphere; this thing played as a classic game, too! It wasn’t obvious; I had to figure out how to win this thing. It was like a puzzle, something I kinda miss with the standardization of mechanics these days. That’s what I mean when I say it felt from that classics era: it was fresh, as games from back then were. After a few runs, I went from being interested in it to actually loving it.
Mark: As an artist yourself, what do you look for in creating a book to showcase the diversity of illustrations within Fallen Gods?
Marcelo: Well, the first thing I looked for was an element that would help me achieve some kind of cohesion. That’s when the UI of the game came into the scene: just had to adapt it and it would give me the forms I needed to link each illustration together, as well as the type for the text. This of course had to be modified to suit the new format, but the game already has that “book” feel, so it was an easy adaptation.
Now, for actually compositing everything, I treated each page as if it were an illustration that will now include the frames and the text: it needed focal points, and a flow. And most importantly: it needed to be clear to the reader... so even if I added some effects here and there to spice things up, I always tried to keep them subtle. The illustrations and text had to do the heavy lifting, my work just needed to frame them and enhance them without getting too much attention.
