Dev Log #2: Art Direction & Aesthetics

With our second dev log, we want to dive a bit deeper into SunderBound’s art direction, our main inspirations, and our intent behind the designs.

The game has recently entered OPEN PLAYTEST, and you can jump in and check out the game right now for free! When you’ve had your fill of the action, you can contribute to the development by leaving your thoughts here, in SunderBound’s Community hub, or on our Discord channel!

Why Dieselpunk?

Back in 2020, we decided that after working on several projects, it was time to start our own IP. We generally knew what kind of game we wanted to build, and we had a ton of ideas about what the theme could be. We narrowed it down to four concepts: Post-apocalyptic, Dieselpunk, Cyberpunk (near future), and Sci-Fi (far future). It quickly became apparent that we were all excited about making a game that scratches the itch for a dark, gritty Dieselpunk setting that we know you’ll love. Years later, we are quite happy with the choice, as the Cyberpunk setting has become even more overcrowded.

Our vision for a novel approach in this setting was grounded in the concept of the Tower: a huge, isolated superstructure reigning over a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape. We imagined it as the last mega-project of humankind, built by generations – and still under construction, rising ever higher toward the clear, uncontaminated skies. We imagined its internal struggles, and an oppressive regime built on a caste system and on ever-present propaganda in the style of Orwell’s “1984”. We took inspiration from other works depicting such a dystopian society, including the post-apocalyptic train “Snowpiercer”, which some of you recognized – but we wanted to bring the concept up to a massive scale.

We leaned on brutalist architecture defined by colossal proportions - cavernous megastructures, oversized industrial tech, armor that seems forged for giants rather than people. As we were making an isometric top-down game, we wanted all important elements to have an exaggerated style, so they could stand out in that perspective. We will dive deeper into that design process in a later dev log!

Finally, we wanted to make Haven feel alive, inhabited, and most importantly, in obvious turmoil. Resources have become scarce, the elites living in the top floors hoard what remains, and the lower floors have gone desperate. We wanted to show that civil unrest visually, and one way we did that was through graffiti all over the once clean, safe streets of Haven.

"We sketched early graffiti concepts for Haven, but they felt wrong – out of place, too ‘American’ for the brutalist Eastern European tone we wanted. Then it hit us: WE live in an Eastern European city that is FULL of graffiti. So we spent a day roaming Sofia’s underpasses, took pictures, and gathered inspiration.

We ended up weaving our own street-art culture into SunderBound, adding an authenticity we couldn’t have achieved otherwise."

• Boris Stoyanov, Art Director on SunderBound