Environment Art Direction for Lotus (Working Title), Luca Malisan
This page presents the Art Direction I developed for the environments of Lotus, a roguelike experience built for replayability and strong visual identity.
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The project’s artistic foundation blends a grounded medieval world with elegant Art Nouveau influences; flowing lines, organic curves, and recurring floral motifs that define the personality of every environment, prop, interface element, and character design.
The art direction establishes the visual pillars that shaped the production of environments and props. Moodboards, references, and style guidelines outline how materials, shapes, silhouettes, and lighting should interact across the game. One of the key creative decisions was adopting an almost‑isometric top‑down perspective to ensure clear gameplay readability while maintaining cinematic mood, realistic surface definition, and a convincing sense of depth. PBR‑inspired material logic was defined at the art‑direction stage to unify the work of environment artists, character teams, and technical artists.
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Character's and UI Art Direction was instead curated by Silvia Romei: https://www.artstation.com/silviaromei
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The castle is constructed around a vertical progression: players begin in the rough, humble “low‑castle” areas and ascend through spaces that gradually become more ornate and refined. This required tight coordination across departments (concepts, characters, 3D models, textures, shaders and lighting) to ensure that every object, prop, and ornament exists in multiple variants reflecting this ascent.
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Shown here is a selection of the core directives and stylistic examples, used to guide the environments' art team.
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Together, these elements form the complete artistic blueprint of Lotus world: a modular, upward‑progressing medieval space enriched by Art Nouveau ornamentation, unified by floral language, and shaped to support both gameplay clarity and visual storytelling.
Freedome Farmers
The Pixel Artist
Luca Malisan
S. K. Riley
