Ruby and the Instigator’s Lair

Initial concept WIPs for Ruby’s character in Disco Elysium. In the end we went with a third design for her you can see in the game.

These environments under the boardwalk are another matter. I was finally feeling confident enough with the environment concepting workflow and remember being very happy with the end result. Hanna Barbera’esque Rostov called it. That’s a test render waay before painting. Rauno Somelar did the detailed modeling. We’d been working together for a long time by that point so I used shorthand liberally (and to his dismay) when concepting for this area.

Getting that lighting working was the toughest nut to crack for me. I spent weeks on it trying to get it to work either in Unity or via our rendering pipeline (all Disco Elysium’s maps were prerendered) without luck. I had to give up on that and put it into the backlog in the hopes that someone will make it work later on. That lighting was very important in this one. Those dynamic light shafts were finally fixed/added just before the game launched in October 2019. Go team!

The tiny map with the yellow guardrails and collapsed stairs was an indulgence on my part. I doodled this into the corner of a larger concept detailing the surroundings of the Feld building above and felt there needed to be something between the basement and the rooftop. This is an obscure nod to Vault 15 in Fallout and its collapsed corridors and tunnels. The whole map underneath the boardwalk is a pretty darn direct nod to Fallout’s first map. I was reminiscing about the feeling of first stepping into the light from the rat-infested tunnels at the mouth of the Vault 13 at the start of the game. And for me the encounter with Ruby was a little like going to meet the Overseer after you’d taken care of Master and his army of supermutants and returned home in triumph…