Montreal gaming studio takes players on a journey through Hell in 33 Immortals

Thunder Lotus Games is, if nothing else, dedicated to keeping it old school. In an industry that's increasingly leaning into digitally-created artwork, or work created by artificial intelligence, the Montreal-based video game studio keeps hand-drawn art as the backbone of its games.

For their latest game, 33 Immortals, which is due for release later this year, they're applying that hand-drawn style to an action adventure steeped in religious mythos. Inspired by Dante Alighieri's famous Divine Comedy, which took readers on a literal journey through hell, 33 Immortals offers up imagery that draws from medieval artwork and architecture.

"The techniques and animation of 2D have also been changing," said Stef Tastan, Thunder Lotus' Art Director.  "They've been improving. They're getting more streamlined. But Thunder Lotus is choosing not to go in the direction of the streamlined type of animation. It really is handcrafted by all of us, so it's really special."

Thunder Lotus was founded in 2014 by Will Dubé. Hand-drawn, two-dimensional artwork made in-house has become the company's calling card. The company has received accolades for their previous hand-drawn games Jotun and Spiritfarer. Tastan and the team working on 33 Immortals are looking to continue Thunder Lotus' unique style while bringing their own talents and inspirations to the table.

The Costa Rican-born illustrator and designer says she began her career in web design and advertising, believing that fine art would be difficult to make a living in. After learning about how video game companies employ visual artists, Tastan moved to Canada specifically for the games industry, which is the third-largest in the world after the United States and Japan. Her talents made her a great fit for Thunder Lotus, where she has worked since 2019.

"The feeling that our games evoke to me … it's kind of like nostalgia, kind of like Saturday cartoons," said Tastan.

In the case of 33 Immortals and its Dante roots, it's part Saturday morning cartoon, and part Sunday church. The plot of the game sees players damned to hell, but rebelling against god's judgment to fight their way out.

"Our game is set in 13th-century Italy," said Tastan. "We had these keywords whenever we were submitting concept art and/or visuals at the very start. We wanted it to feel 'medieval,' 'religious' — like in the Catholic sphere —  and 'threatening.'"

Tastan and her team of artists found that inspiration included things like illuminated manuscripts, stained-glass windows and even Montreal's architecture. Tastan noted the atmosphere and Gothic design of Notre Dame Cathedral for her work.

"The solid feeling, when you go to Notre Dame on the inside … that darkness, the light that only permeates through the little stained glasses on the sides and stuff — that's very inspirational for some areas of our game."

Initial concept designs are tied to a specific "need" for the game: an enemy the player has to fight, an icon they interact with, or a background for a level. Tastan's art team would draw up between three to five pitch designs based on instruction from the creative director and game designers. Together, they would decide on one of those pitches to pursue as the chosen artwork. Then, animation director Nathan Dupouy and his team would draft poses of the selected design, showing how it would look in different animations.

"It's always starting from a game design idea first," said Dupouy. "That's something that is quite a big difference between traditional TV shows or movies when it comes to creating art or animation."

Like Tastan, Dupouy — who's originally from France — moved to Canada specifically to work in video games, and especially for Thunder Lotus. With a background in comic book artwork, Dupouy was drawn to Thunder Lotus as one of the only studios still animating with hand-drawn objects.

"It's quite rare," said Dupouy. "My goal is definitely to make it look like a drawing as much as possible when it comes to animation, because that's why I'm here and that's what makes the studio a bit unique."

For the animators, work on the hand-drawn artwork often involves figuring out how the characters will move by doing things like looking at old fencing manuals. They also consider a static piece of artwork might change in tone when it moves.

"It happens sometimes with small monsters that can become cute in a way when you animate them," Dupouy says. "My goal is also, as a director, to try to correct these things and make sure everything fits in the same animation language."

Once Dupouy's animation team has refined the initial design and presented the creative director with a few frames of animation, they test that design in-game to see how it looks and feels during gameplay. If things look and play well, Tastan and Dupouy iron out the final details, tweaking things like a character's clothes or body shape. The entire process can take a few weeks, and has to be repeated for each element of the game, from characters to enemies to inventory items and more.

It might sound like an appropriately hellish process for a Dante-inspired game, but Tastan says they found joy in unexpected places during the development process. Working on the game's "perks system," for instance, allowed a level of creative freedom Tastan didn't expect. The system sees players accumulating currencies and then spending them with Dante himself to upgrade their abilities. 

"At first, we were really scared because we were like, how do I put into a picture: 'gifts 30 percent more health or whatever.'" Tastan says. "What we decided to do was just take a little bit of the psychology of what the attack is doing and make it look like a little medieval illustration. It almost looks like a little medieval embroidery that you would see on a tapestry. I love this game. I love everything that we do, but that was one of my most cherished assignments."