The Art Of Icarus

We recently had a long chat with the creators behind Icarus, Dean Hall’s latest survival adventure, so it only made sense that we spent some time having a look at some of the game’s art.

One of the pain points of Icarus‘s development, according to Dean Hall, was nailing the art direction. “We specifically said we didn’t want to do bubblegum sci-fi — no Destiny. We wanted that gritty, truckers in space, Alien style,” Hall said.

So how do you thread that needle between realism and sci-fi without being flashy or glossy? The answer lies in a lot of environments, textures and designs that err on the side of the familiar, with most of the sci-fi coming from the technology instead of things like xeno biodomes.

The Rocketwerkz team was generous enough to send me a massive dump of concept art and in-engine renders from their team. All the work below you’ll see comes from concept and senior concept artists Campbell Crawford, Minnie Zhou, Matthew Forsyth and George Lovesy, and underneath that you’ll see how it all translates to Icarus proper.

This post has been retimed following the recent beta weekend for Icarus.

Minnie Zhou

Matthew Forsyth

Campbell Crawford

George Lovesy

That’s a ton of incredible work. And as mentioned before, here’s how all of that comes together to create Icarus‘s in-game look. When players actually get hands on with Icarus, they’ll start out in the more familiar Earth-like biomes before progressing to more visually hostile locations.

Icarus‘s first chapter, titled First Cohort will be due out sometime this year. It’ll be followed by New Frontier and Dangerous Horizons. If you want to see more of the development process, two “making of” videos have been published on the Icarus YouTube page.