Three games, 10 years, one Unity project: Piecing together The Immortal John Triptych | Unity

Your games are built entirely from real paintings. What does that process actually look like?

I start by scouring museum archives – hundreds of paintings – saving anything interesting into folders by content: landscapes, landscapes that look particularly green, interiors of pubs, whatever. Once a folder has enough similar material, I try to build it into a scene, starting with the background. I’m not disciplined about it – I’ll be working on three scenes at once, and something that doesn’t fit one will get moved into another. It’s tinkering, tinkering, tinkering, then animating the pieces that can loop well.

Only once I’ve got a scene do I bring it into Unity – and even then I have no idea what the story is, no idea what the puzzles are. I walk around the space trying to make connections from one room to the next, making sure things are interconnected rather than everything happening in one place. Most people write the whole game first, then build it in grey boxes, then put the artwork on at the end. I do it exactly backwards – the last thing I figure out is what the game’s actually about. Puzzles come from walking the finished art and spotting potential – that looks like a well, there’s a bucket over there, what do we need water for. Story comes dead last. There’s been a point in every game where I’ve genuinely not been sure it was going to make sense. I’ve pulled it together three times in a row, but sometimes it feels like luck that it lands.