The ruins of Lugaru

People who played Lugaru will be familiar with the ruins in that game-- often simple blocks of stone-like material, they played a critical gameplay role in many of the levels. Going into Overgrowth, I thought this was one of the more original aspects of the art direction. They seemed very mysterious and abstract, and that was my favorite thing about them.

The best example of my old Lugaru 2 ruins concepts.

It was kind of hard to keep the designs of the ruins abstract enough. When I first started working on Lugaru 2 my designs were very different. Part of the problem was understanding them. As a player I wanted the mysterious ruins to be mysterious, but as a designer, I had to have a concrete understanding of where these things came from and why. This involved a lot of deep discussion with David over the course of many years.

One of my first concepts for the new style of ruins.

Recently we have been talking about pushing the ruins into more interesting territory. We want things to make sense and be consistent, but there is a lot of room for more imaginative concepts. It took awhile to settle on how these new idea fit into the world but I have been working on new concepts.

Here is an example of our arch ruins. One of many new things in Overgrowth.

What do you think about the ruins?