Dissecting the Art and Visuals of Graveyard Keeper 2

Hello again, Keepers.

This dev diary is dedicated to fans of a particular kind of "autopsy." On the operating table today: the visuals of Graveyard Keeper 2.

While we tried to preserve the spirit and art style of the original game, we couldn't resist making several major technical changes.

Let's take a look at what's inside. And most importantly, what's changed?

Farewell, 2D compromises

The original Graveyard Keeper was a stylized pixel-art game. Even so, a lot of effort went into adding various technological tricks, such as dynamic shadows and volumetric lighting, which helped create a more pleasant, tactile world.

That said, during the development, our tech tree was constrained by the limitations of 2D graphics. For Graveyard Keeper 2, we decided not to hold ourselves back and built everything in 3D, for a world we could fully experiment with.

This honest approach was quite the challenge, but it opened the door to new features despite the fixed camera angle. For instance, the sun now genuinely orbits the Earth, exactly as the finest minds of the Middle Ages imagined!

You can set your watch by the shadows of the spruce trees.

Did you think the night was a quiet time to rest after a long day's work? Now, night means proper, dynamic shadows. Grinding at the graveyard after sunset has become, at the very least, prettier.

Checkmate to anyone who enjoys a healthy sleep schedule.

Nature and weather

For us, Graveyard Keeper has always felt, in part, like an escape from boring modern life into a world far away from the hustle and bustle. So we paid a lot of attention to natural locations, to make indulging in the sin of escapism, whether picking berries or robbing beehives, even more pleasant.

It's frightening to even think about how much time went into creating a water shader for deep mountain ponds that we'd actually like ourselves, and that would stay flexible for scene work.

Just please, don't throw corpses in there. One zombie invasion in the city is already enough for everyone.

In reality, a forest doesn't stand motionless, waiting for the player to chop it down. Our artists added plenty of small, unnoticeable at first glance, but immersion-critical animations to it. For example, the entire forest and grass now react to the wind as the weather changes.

Also, thanks to the genuine 3D volume, we were able to afford beautiful, deep fog — to thicken, so to speak, the depth of our little fantasy world.

The Town

Another big feature of the sequel, of course, is access to the Town. We wanted it to feel large-scale and alive, or rather, "very dead," since it's populated by zombies, if you know what we mean. We imagined the layout as dense and varied. But we didn't want to just build a big village with a bunch of separate houses. We needed a Town, with a capital "T." So we had to put in the work.

Long story short, we got a little carried away and ended up building an entire separate construction kit, where every detail could be swapped and customized. This gave us the flexibility to assemble the location's skeleton quickly and focus more on the Town's unique elements.

Pretty cool, sure. But it seems our specialist's brain was fully corrupted by the end of this task.

A note of interest

The Middle Ages were inseparably tied to antiquity, really more of a continuation of it: laws, cities, knowledge, and cultural heritage survived across the centuries. In our fictional world, we decided not to stray from that pattern, even in environmental design. The game's world lived long before the Keeper ever showed up…

That’s it for today!

What would you like to hear about next? Let us know in the comments!

We can't wait to share more about what's coming in Graveyard Keeper 2!