Everyones favourite the Railgun! I enjoyed working on this and looking at how railgun technology works.
This is a pump shotgun. They were initially designed as a manufacturing series. A scrapped idea.
I love ammo belts and ammo drums so I look for every excuse I can to include them. I don't think this made it into the game though sadly :'(
The manufacturing series thumbnails.
This is REAAAALLLY old! One of the earliest concepts I did. It was supposed to be a key art capturing the vision of the entire gameplay experience before there was even a game! What do you think? No art direction had been developed yet nor designs.
Stalker concept! I had a lot of fun with this one. I love bugs... as in insects.
I was assigned to explore armor customization content as a feature. "Go crazy. Even Crazier!" At chicken... "Perfect!" I think it was pitched to higher ups to see where we should draw the line and what we could do thematically.
I explored an idea of making unique themes of armor by kitbashing from existing pieces and adding few new ones to save on production time. This is just an exploration and not designs for actual sets.
Then I explored an idea of doing multiple tiers of armor within a set theme, getting even more content out in an interesting way. This is just an exploration and not designs for actual sets.
Lastly I explored some unique armor ideas in more detail and staying within the Helldivers palette. After this I explored "features" that I came up with like vfx on armor, robotic limbs or attached trophy remains of enemies. The middle is my favourite.
I did tons of capes...
Many capes. They were easy to do. Quick if you did them sloppy and messy like I did. Speed for the win! I did all the capes of Gauntlet too. Many that didn't show in the game!
Actual armor concepts that made it in game. I did many more of these. FYI one of my first tasks at Arrowhead in 2014 was designing the Helldivers 1 Armor sets!
For when you need a break.
Drone backpack. Collaboration with Magnus Nyström! We also did tons of back and forth on many gameplay assets. Eventually he started doing his own concepts!
The notorious tesla turret! And a robot that fit the page. Robot was a big part of Helldivers 1.
Defensive wall with laughably simple explanation of how it can unfold. I let Shashank Sharma the artist decide how he thought would be the best approach.
Picking up samples in the world is a way of progressing with currency... this is a screwed up idea of something like that!
Hive tyrant larva. This was supposed to be a carry objective for the bug missions. Fun and quick concept to do!
I did this on my own as a concept for the Admiral during development. At the time he was using the standard Heavy Armor and didn't have a custom look. I thought it was important and had some time between tasks and this sketch is what came out of that.
Concept for the stratagem ball. It needed to show multiple different states in game so it was important to check visibility. Also it needed a mechanism for it to stop rolling. The states are type of stratagem, arming and armed.
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.
