Dolorian Church of Humanity in Martinaise

The window

The window

Constantly rendering tests

Constantly rendering tests

How the sausage was made…

How the sausage was made…

Dora’s luggage

Dora’s luggage

Oh boy! The Church in Disco Elysium was one of the hardest maps to design. Sooo much went down there, so many strands of critical lore and story converged there and each one came loaded with their own dictates. In the beginning it wasn’t Dora in the window, if you can believe that — there’s at least one more sketch in Disco’s Final Cut artbook that has the first one… — and the story was only sketched out when I first took a stab at it. In the end it took over a year of picking it up and setting it aside every couple of weeks. We started from the outside because we had a pretty spot on image of it from a key art piece Rostov had made earlier and worked our way in. It was such a mess during WIP though and it was MY mess so I believe I ended up modeling the whole thing myself, too.

The painting itself was more for describing the lore for ourselves than as a serious ingame asset (and a bit for me to have fun coming up with new stuff). It started out as a kind of traditional stained glass mosaic window, but ended up an impossible confluence of science and the arts with a huge single pane of glass literally stained with the paints that make the image. Very few of it can be seen in the game because of the HUGE GAPING HOLE in the middle of it. However in the process I did get to design one of the key characters in the game, which was cool. I wish I’d got a chance at giving her a more unique portrait too.

I’ve included Rauno’s first pass at modeling her where we were trying to figure out how to put her in The Scene. Her in-game look with the luggage and everything was hammered out I think in a day to get it all finished on time to get it animated too and... What a rush, this development of games!