Early concept of the Helldiver Destroyer ship. But far from the first that I did!
The final design. The Helldiver design language had evolved from high detail popular sci-fi look into a harsher and more minimalist look by this point. Art Direction by Calle Schytt Winberg. Oskar Edlund built the 3D model whom I went back and fourth with
The space station seen briefly when entering the game. Most work was only done as quick sketches to keep a high speed.
A question was asked if super earth sent civilians and cargo through space in non military transports, what would that look like? Quick and very sloppy sketches!
Turret sketches for the destroyer ship. I did tons of 1 minute sketches during the project whilst in meetings or away from the computer for all kinds of things. Filled up a few notebooks in the end...
This pod design ended up as the pod that the Helldivers enters at the end of the tutorial. They were designed to fit on the ship interior.
I liked to do these short animation clips to explain the functionality.
I designed the delivery system, the pod and the room for this sketch. I enjoyed thinking about how things work and looked at a lot of discovery channel vids...
The shuttle. One of many versions. I think this is the foundation of the current in game version that Oskar made. Tore Wesolowski also did several versions of the Shuttle.
Frv vehicle concept and model paintover. The concept wasn't finalized until the in game blockout had a paintover concept for it with many of the game assets.
Shuttle interior concept
Early repair drone concept.
Full vehicle lineup with an unfinished Eagle concept. Direction wanted to view the whole vehicle arsenal together as a package before making decisive commitments. This look was later changed in favor of a more nostalgic one.
Eagle weapon armaments. Even for something as hard to see as this we wanted to put a lot of care into believability and detail for those who would take their time to appreciate the worldbuilding of the game.
Eagle weapon attachments. The idea was that much like real jet fighters, the Eagle plane would be able to switch out a number of different weapon options that it could carry.
These are a small sample of work that I did for Helldivers 2. I was the first Concept artist on the project back in December of 2015 and I stayed on the project for 6,5 years. Since the concept team was so small we worked on every area of the game, all of us, from UI to Characters and Environments and all factions. We started out at about 35 developers and slowly grew over the years to over 100. We had a very ambitious vision of going from stylized top down to 3rd person realism so we had a lot to accomplish and learn. The project and art direction changed drastically many times during the development!
Due to the nature of our development strategy, our ambitious goal and our small development team, most concept art was only done as very rough and quick sketches. I don't dare to show you the ugliest stuff. But usually our work speed ranged from several concepts per day 3 days per asset and on very rare occasions up to a full week, depending on it's importance.
