Somewhere ✦ Game Illustrations

Studio Oleomingus is an indie game and art practice studio, based in Chala, India. Their work is conducted at the intersection of postcolonial writing and interactive fiction, using videogame spaces as sites of discourse, resistance, and record.

Oleomingus's major output is an anthology called Somewhere, a text-driven exploration video game about the search for a mythical city called Kayamgadh. Each individual work can be experienced as a short story in this narrative. We collaborated with the studio to create illustrations for the stories told within the game.

. . . But a long time ago, when the elephants were still white, and the people of Tok reveled in these verdant lands, the great Pasha Usk, that seven-headed ruler of Jumbali, built his fabled fortress here.

This wondrous structure began with a ring of four thousand intricately carved bastions. Each a marble and sandstone monstrosity, adorned by all manner sculpture, from demonic snakes to ethereal lions to imperious people, and the various gods and goddesses venerated by the people of Tok.

The giant outer-walls gave way to a lavish keep and a palace complex of such vast dimensions that, when GrudalBheg, the god of thunder, sought to descend upon his earthly abode (the peak of TakorNuk), He landed on the Pasha's palace instead, believing the vast and glorious fortress to be the mountain of Nuk.

Studio Oleomingus has built magical worlds full of luxurious patterns and vivid colors, but we wanted the illustrations to occupy a separate visual vocabulary of their own.

We decided to take influence from the craft of Pattachitra, and build upon hand-drawn black and white linework to represent the various intertwining narratives in the game. It worked wonderfully: while it is certainly ornate enough to be fascinating to look at, the black and white contrasts the visuals of the rest of the game perfectly.

Using frames helped us distinguish the various narratives from one another. Historical records were represented in a rectangular frame, while mythical illustrations are all in circular frames.

See more work at bykins.com