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Goodday everyone! I know this blog has been dormant for a while now, and that's completely on me and life getting in the way!

With all the events happening on twitter/in email/arg related things, I'm making this as a call post for people to sumbit/ask with media any tweet responses/emails/general goings on from the last few days! This blog is an archive intended to be used by the wider fandom, so having everything that has been happening these last few days be kept in one place would be very useful for future reference!

Thank you all!

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Various renders of various items you can find i IEYTD 2 by Shawn Donghyun Kang.

Renders shown below.

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Various renders of the Agency training machine from IEYTD 2 by Shawn Donghyun Kang.

Renders shown below.

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Various renders from the map and elevator in IEYTD 2 by Shawn Donghyun Kang.

Renders shown below.

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Various renders from the elevator trap from the end of IEYTD 2 by Shawn Donghyun Kang.

Renders shown below.

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Various renders of many different types of explosives and flammables by Shawn Donghyun Kang.

Renders shown below.

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Various renders showing the nuclear briefcase from IEYTD 2 by Shawn Donghyun Kang.

Renders shown below.

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glad to see that you're preserving some of the concept art and references from artstation. one of my favorite pieces of concept art (from astro leon-jhong) used to be on there, but when i came back to the website i was devastated to find it completely missing. it was especially painful because i managed to find a never-before-seen (by me, at least) addition to the black and white concept art series, and i was going to make my own tumblr post about it. all that's left of the original image that i can find is this incredibly low resolution image off of google that still remains registered in the artstation cache or something

for posterity though, you can also have the aforementioned never-before-seen piece, which i found in the middle of an ieytd interview from oculus in 2016. strangely enough, astro goes completely unmentioned, but the style is almost undoubtedly his

Thank you so much! I greatly appreciate anything like this because I'm still new to archiving and I don't know how to find everything still. This blog was made with the intention of being a community blog, so anyone is free to help out with anything related to the games, such as things cut from them or niche concept art.

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Various renders for the hats and masks found in IEYTD 2 by Shawn Donghyun Kang.

Renders shown below.

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Lots of unused prototype models which would have been used in IEYTD 2 by Shawn Donghyun Kang.

Renders shown below.

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Renders of the monitors and radio from in the van in IEYTD 2 by Shawn Donghyun Kang.

Renders pictured below.

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IEYTD 2 promo art, which I believe can be found on the t-shirts which were sold at Pax West, done by Leon-Jhong.

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Various pieces of concept art for IEYTD by Leon-Jhong.

Art included under the cut.

"old concept for the level that took place in a car crushing scrap building"

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An early unused layout for Party Crasher in IEYTD 2 as well as some development insight by Zachary D. Cole.

Art and dev insight below - as usual I cannot include the speedpaint, but it is accessible through the link provided.

"The wine cellar level went through a whole lot of changes throughout production, so this was actually the first key art I did for this level before it was overhauled again for the final layout. - It needed to feel like the most luxurious expensive wine cellar ever, so I tried to make it look like no expense had been spared with things like gold plated accents, glass cabinets, and a hand carved marble wall feature off to the side. - There were also several gameplay considerations to account for in this key art that were already being mocked up in the whitebox that I painted over, like hidden escape hatches, candles to let players light things on fire, etc. - This is a perfect example of Design putting together a rough level layout, and then Concept helps to flesh it out and give an idea how the final level could look and feel, without investing weeks of time on textures and full 3D models before they’re sure they want to go in that direction. - In this case, once we explored this version of the level and did some user testing, Design decided the level needed reworked again. So the final level looks significantly different, but this early key art was a vital step in figuring out what we wanted for the finished design. - I love this aspect of Concept, it’s part of our job to save the team time by exploring ideas through drawings and paintings before they move forward with final ideas - it’s way faster to draw a whole bunch of ideas first than jumping straight into making 3D models, and then redo them if they don’t work for the game you’re making. And for me it’s a ton of fun creating and exploring ideas."

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Some early art for Eaves Drop from IEYTD 2 with some developer insight by Zachary D. Coe.

Art and dev insight below, I couldn't include the speedpaint of the art but it can be found through the link.

"Finally I can post some of the stuff I’ve been working on! - Thank you all for hanging in there as I know I have not been able to post much and also because, just like the rest of the country, this has been an incredibly difficult year… and I’ve been pretty overwhelmed to say the least. - But the awesome news is, with I Expect You to Die 2 coming out this month (August 24th), I can now officially post some of my artwork! - Here’s some still shots and a time lapse video showing the progress, from painting over the Designer’s whitebox base to the final touches. - Let’s start with the paint over part - For those not familiar with the term, “paint over”, it means to take a screenshot of a white box, or 3D image, etc from the game and paint/draw right over top of it. - Paint overs are very common in the game industry, sometimes used for marketing images to advertise the game, and sometimes used so a Concept Artist can take a rough 3D object or scene and add details or explore potential ideas to push it further. It’s generally WAY faster to explore what something could look like as a concept painting than it is to model an idea in fully detailed 3D, see if it works or not for the game, and then start over again if it doesn’t work. - So first things first, for this level, Design had the base level white boxed (or roughly laid out with 3D boxes etc) to get a feel for how big the level should be, approximately where certain key objects should be placed around the player, etc. This is actually the second layout for this particular level. For a long while we had another version white boxed that was pretty different and, eventually once we got back to being able to work more on it, the team felt it needed some significant changes so it was slowly reworked into this layout - except the winding staircase, that was a huge favourite across the board, so we kept that.

- As I worked on this level I had to also keep in mind the various nuances of the character the room belongs to, and that’s where a lot of the personality came from. The messiness, the notes and blueprints, the “evidence board” style pushpins and strings connecting various blueprints and drawings, all of it was done to communicate the chaotic creativity and thought process of the (yet to be publicly revealed) character who works here. - The process video covers my progress on this from beginning to end, with lots of changes along the way from team members and Directors, so as you watch the video you’ll also see some ideas I put in partway through that I took back out later. This is where digital painting is great - you can work in layers, so if if you need to change something you can often turn off the layers for that part and draw in something else! - Stay tuned, as I can I’ll definitely try to keep posting more."

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Some original concept art for Jet Set in IEYTD 2, and some development insight by Zachary D. Coe

Art & dev insight below - I couldn't include the speedpaint of drawing the art, but you can watch through the link,

"So I’m following up with the I Expect You to Die 2 art that I did, and I’m now allowed to talk about the Jet Set key art. - Design knew early on in development that we wanted a level set in a private jet, and we spent a LOT of time testing this level in white box first. We worked to get that luxurious feel of a private aircraft/limo in the sky with the décor, architecture, etc. And all with the understanding that this had to work within the VR space. - And because our goal was to build this with a fairly real-world scale and dimension, we also had to work to be very careful with placement of storage spaces and hidden compartments. For instance, the outer walls of a plane are pretty thin, so we had to be careful how much stuff we tried to hide in wall panels. - The same with hidden table panels, there’s very little room to work with, so we had to carefully lay out where each compartment in the table was, and how they could open without interfering with the openings of neighboring storage slots. - As I worked to create all of that feel, I have to say that one of my favourite bits of the key art painting I did in this post is the John Juniper duck. After I painted this in, the team liked it so much that there was a brief time where the team considered making themed rubber duckies be the hidden collectibles throughout the game, but ultimately decided to go in another direction. - Still though, a super fun idea game idea was considered, based on something I had a chance to concept. For me, that is definitely the most satisfying part of doing concept art. As most of you know by now, being a concept artist means constantly having to work through a lot of iterations and incorporate many ideas and produce tons of art, some of which may never be seen by the public. Many of your ideas may honestly not work, and you have to develop a thick skin for sure. So it is an incredibly great feeling when something from a concept inspires the team enough to even consider it in gameplay. - All in all it was fun challenge as there were SO many complex interconnected elements to this level to figure out, but I had an absolute blast working on it.

- For all those considering a career in concept art, this is the perfect example and a great litmus test as to whether or not you would enjoy it. I happen to love complex pieces and lots of puzzles and figuring things out. That’s a part of concept art that really makes me excited and keeps me going. - But I’m not gonna kid you, it is a lot of repetition and putting together hundreds of puzzle pieces, without the picture on the box to guide you. Add in a lot of opinions and various ever-changing art direction as well and it’s a challenge for sure, but for me that is part of the fun!"

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A much more in depth look at the design process for the John Juniper logo from IEYTD 2 (compared to this post here) done by Zachary D. Coe.

Renders and development insight below.

"Part of the world building for this game included giving the the main character, John Juniper, his own logo.

This went through a LOT of iterations, from my first initial concepts to get the look and feel we all felt best fit the character, to what we wanted to indicate about him. In my experience, logos always take a lot of iteration because they represent so much about the game, character or company they’re made for. So if you’re ever working on a logo just go into it expecting it to take more time than usual.

I played around with a lot of various ideas using J’s, masks, crowns and elaborate filigree to represent the extravagance of the character, his fascination with masks, how he sees himself, etc.

With logos, I start in black and white. I like to start with the simplest form as it helps me create concepts. And Logos are used in a variety of ways in marketing, prop design, etc, and often get applied as a single color, so I want to make sure the logo reads clearly even when used in its simplest form.

After the team narrowed it one down to 3 designs, we felt strongest about (H2, I2 and P2 in the pics above), We ended up with the final design variation being the outer frame of H2 and made the centerpiece one large mask instead, and I went on to redraw and vector it.

It was so satisfying that we now had a logo that we all felt strongly represented JJ.

You can see this logo used all over the game, in a variety of applications - printed material, embroidered into furniture, and even sculpted into parts of John’s house.

When you play the game, try seeing how many places you can find it! It was a long process, but well worth it."