Deus Ex: Breach
Deus Ex: Breach is finally out as a stand alone on Steam, so it's probably a good time for me to put a few things out here from my work on this game.
Breach was a complex task to tackle. I was in charge of the art direction, under the supervision of Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, the franchise executive art director, and I was also producing all the concept arts (Environments, characters, props,...). But since we were a small team, everyone did more than their share, so I also gave a hand on the UI, some 3D assets and even some scripting.
As a consequence, I opted to work mostly on paper, for speed's sake, using watercolor for quick color or lighting indication.
You can read more about the project here:
http://wp.me/p5SdKz-6L
Official logo I designed for the stand-alone version of the game.
Preliminary sketch for the game's key art. The final version was eventually executed by Bruno Gauthier-Leblanc.
Early concept sketch illustrating the notion that everything in Deus Ex: Breach was mostly made of black cubes and white plating. I also wanted to echo Tsutomu Nihei's Blame!'s sense of scale and architecture.
Concept for the Shadow(hild character and player avatar.
Concept for a corridor in the Breach section of System Rift, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's first DLC.
Sketch for the Berserker avatar.
Early sketch for the Hot_Rod avatar
A few details for the Hot-Rod avatar. Completely indulged in my love for Japanese animation mechanical design there.
Concept for a switch.
Concept for the DataSphere, a prop tied to a gameplay mode in the game.
Sketch for the Drone enemy type.
Concepts for grenades and mines. I had to re-design all the elements from Deus Ex: Makind Divided, but I tried to still evoke the originals in my design, so that players could recognize them faster.
Early sketch for the central structure in Versalife. As you play, you unlock iterations of the same environments, and I wanted to show an evolution. Here, the higher you get, the more deconstructed the map becomes.
Concept for a lighting idea for the Picus maps.
Sketch for a decorative element. I did plenty of those that we would sprinkle on maps to add density in the otherwise empty environments. Level design was the star of the show so art had to stay out of the way. These ingredients helped counter that.
Concept for the Picus maps.
Concept for the "lobby" of the Breach section of System Rift.
Environment sketch for Santeau. For this one and a few others, I'd load up the level design greyblocks of the map and sketch in front of my screen as I would in plein air.
Concept for the visual logic behind the ledges in Versalife.
Architecture sketches for the Steiner environments.
Concept for the visual logic of the door frames in Versalife.
Mood sketch of the Santeau map. The level design asked for something very vertical, and evoking a cityscape seemed to make sense.
In order to help players map out the environments in their heads, I had to create a signage system that would be used to label floors or doors. But as I didn't want letters or numbers, I came up with this system.
Concept for Tarvos door frames.
Early sketches for the pistol. I had to redesign ALL the guns. And there are A LOT OF THEM.
Early sketch for the sniper rifle.
Mood sketch of the sea of data idea. The idea behind map selection menu in Deus Ex: Breach is that you're still in VR but you're standing outside the servers. So you're basically looking at the whole Web, which is that ever-moving magma.
Early draft of the logo.