Hollow Home News

Hello everyone,

I’m Olya, lead artist at Twigames and art director on the Hollow Home project – and today I’m taking over this newsletter. I’ll guide you through our approach to art style and show some of the latest developments.
But first, I wanted to say that we’re really pleased with the initial interest in our recently launched Steam page. If you haven’t already done so, don’t forget to wishlist and follow Hollow Home there. Every wishlist motivates us to move forward.

So, who am I?

I’m from Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. At university, I studied environmental design, working on interior, landscape and architecture. I even had a job in this field. But in 2014, finding work in the city became harder, as it was close to the frontline: people hesitated to invest in businesses there, and many of my contracts fell through. However, the demand for graphic design and websites was still high, so I switched. And then switched again, this time to UI artist.

And that’s how I got to Twigames. In 2019, the studio had an open position for a UI designer with good art skills – so we had a match. In the last four years, I worked on lots of fascinating projects, mostly for mobile platforms, but some were for AR/VR, which is an interesting challenge for a UI expert.

I also play acoustic and bass guitar, create fonts and sometimes go to LARP events.

What do I do on Hollow Home?

Hollow Home is a fully in-house project, so I’m taking care of lots of areas: from developing the general art style of the game to working on specific design tasks. I even learned to do 3D and technical art to achieve the style we wanted.

As an art director, I’m in charge of the art pipeline and monitoring that everything meets the requirements, both artistic and technical.

What is the visual style of Hollow Home?

From the very beginning, we understood the limits of our studio. Obviously, we can’t develop an AAA game. So we had to shift the focus, filling the usual environmental forms with expressive visuals.

I was amazed by Alberto Mielgo’s work in Love, Death & Robots and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It felt like a whole new animation style, and I can definitely say that it’s the main source of inspiration for our team – mixed with the environments we grew up in. We tried to imagine our typical Ukrainian surroundings in that visual style. Also, ZA/UM with their unparalleled Disco Elysium gave us confidence and inspiration. If a small studio could create such a unique and stunning visual style, we could do it too.

I started working on Hollow Home’s visuals by doing a few concepts to determine the balance between the art being picturesque and detailed. The first drafts were vivid and pictorial, almost like works of impressionists, but didn’t hold up with the isometric camera view: the textures looked flat and uninteresting. This is how the dots, stripes, and little accents became a part of our art style. They add this feel of a painting to the way the game looks – along with bright spots, broad brush strokes, variety of tones in the same color. Everything works to create a feeling of a city that was lively and nice.

To bring locations to life, we fill them with details, especially the things you often see in Ukraine, like flowerbeds made of tires that are common in the apartment blocks here.

Making characters lively is also a challenge with the isometric camera. It comes down to the exaggeration of the animations a bit, highlighting a person’s temper and age.



The work process explained

The pipeline starts with a request for specific art from game designers. If it is an in-game object, we discuss how it should look, how it will be used and other details. Depending on that, we decide on what color schemes and technical solutions we can use. For example, if it’s an object lying at the location, we have to make it bright and noticeable and test its proportions, so it isn’t too small for the player to see.

After everything is set, I create a task for the artist. And after it’s done, I give feedback and test if the art complies with technical requirements.





What is important for me to accomplish in Hollow Home

For me, the main thing is creating the atmosphere of a city that is not ideal but still dear to Maksym, the protagonist. We’re working hard on homelike and visually appealing locations. I hope our players will love them.

Thank you for reading! We have a few more announcements in the near future, so stay tuned.
And stay safe!

Olya
Twigames

Hey everyone,
Greetings from beautiful Kyiv! Valerii here, the studio head at Twigames.

Probably some of you know (and somebody definitely doesn't) that we send newsletters sometimes. We send it every 4-6 weeks to share our updates. Also, as the project is very personal for us, we make different people from the team to write that letters as personal ones. We just want to tell to our community more about our personal feelings and reasons to work on the project about the war. Hope it would be interesting for you.

Feel free to subscribe at the game's website: https://www.hollowhomegame.com/

I also thought that would be nice to keep these letters somewhere, so I decided to post them here. The first letter was written by me and was send in July before we released the teaser. So it is a bit old. But all the following ones we'll post here in time.

So who am I

I’m the studio head here at Twigames and serve as a Lead Producer on Hollow Home. I started as a programmer more than 10 years ago, gradually shifting to managing and producing roles.

In 2015 I founded Twigames, where we developed lots of games, both on our own and as an outsourcing outfit: mobile projects, PC, console, VR/AR, you name it.

In 2017 I also started the Kyiv Indies Meetup, which sadly is currently on pause because of the full-scale russian invasion

How did we come up with the idea of Hollow Home & why did we decide to develop it

The idea of Hollow Home was born last spring when we were reading about the brutal russian onslaught on Mariupol. The heroic defenders of “Azovstal” were still holding the steel plant. The shocking events were all over the news but we still felt that more people around the world should know what horror is happening there and all over Ukraine.
As a game development studio, we felt we should stick to what we do best and transform our grief into a game. And as games are the biggest media form out there, we can reach people’s hearts around the world.

How are we handling the sensitive theme of the ongoing war

We are fully aware that we’re dealing with an extremely hard theme. People in our country are killed by russians each day, almost everyone in Ukraine lost somebody in the war. So our top priority is the utmost respect for the victims. That's why we don’t make Hollow Home an action-packed entertainment piece. We can’t create a “fun” experience out of others’ suffering. So instead we’re focusing on the toll that the war puts on ordinary people.

Thankfully, modern games are a mature enough medium to handle such themes.

What sources of information do we use to accurately portray the war

So the main reference for Hollow Home is Mariupol and its people. We gathered a 600-page document with reports, evidence, and even last spring’s weather data. We read the diaries of survivors – and talk with them. Their stories, as horrifying as they be, are an invaluable source of information for portraying what it’s like to survive in the besieged city.

What is our goal with Hollow Home

We want people all over the world to “feel” what’s happening in Ukraine. The longer Ukraine stays in the news, in the hearts and minds, the more help we get, and the more Ukrainians will live.

We’re openly political here. The war isn’t just a tragedy, it’s a crime of colossal proportions committed by russia. With Hollow Home, we’re reminding everyone that this crime is still happening and the offender is still not punished.

What’s next for Hollow Home

Our team is actively working on the game’s new build, which will feature the first two playable game days. Our current plan is to finish it in the next few months, and then, hopefully, we’ll be able to show it to you.

Thank you for reading. Stay safe!
Valerii
Twigames

Our team is ready to give you a glimpse into the Hollow Home gameplay. The video shows the last day of our characters' peaceful lives – before the first air raid alert changed everything.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Hollow Home is still very early in production. What you see in the teaser is bound to be changed and updated as the development goes on. But we still wanted to share it to show how we approach Hollow Home as a game that will reflect the current war in Ukraine in a meaningful way.