Artwork for The Killing Stone

The Killing Stone

2026

Senior Environment/Tech Artist

PROJECT

The Killing Stone is a card battler featuring animated figurines with a first person narrative set in the 17th century in a remote region of the Artic circle.

SUMMARY

Working on the Killing Stone was primarily split into two veins. One was working with narrative to create a cohesive storytelling environment, making and decorating with the props to fit the time period and give the player rich atmosphere in which to play. The other was to create the tools by which the rest of the art could be made.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Environment Layout - Doing the principle layout and modelling with alongside the narrative and design teams to create a cohesive environment. Building layout as well as specialized areas like the stone walls of the grotto benefited from the use of Houdini to keep iteration rapid and flexible.
Modeling Props - Modeled most of the environment props in the game including the game board and maven tools. Most modelling work was done with a combination of Blender and Houdini.
Authored Stylized Texturing Pipeline - Created a toolset authored in Substance Designer and structured in Substance Painter to be used on characters and props. Process involved custom splattered brush strokes which were guided by a paintable direction layer. These brush strokes would be used to alter the world space normals + user defined layers to apply the painted look. The world space normals would be converted to tangent as a last step to fit the standard unreal pipeline.
Shader Development - Authoring and management of all parent materials for the game, such as the architectural materials that allowed us to layer decay in the environment that would more visible over the course of the game.

Responsibilities Breakdown

ENVIRONMENT LAYOUT

The initial layout for the Killing Stone was done in conjunction with the designer Shane Paluski when the title was still an action title. A large manor was assembled in UE5 using the cubebrush tool to rough out the architecture and various decorative props to start defining the intent of each space. After a time the call was made to switch the game to a card game with a more intimate narrative so our art director Stephen Alexander and myself chose the Den area as an initial pretty corner to help define the visual goals from the environment.

As the game is set in the 17th century we were looking a lot at nordic and scandanavian architecture, in particular stave churches as a way to get a natural wood space that would have a lot of vertical interest and places for moonlight to spill in from the outside. It was tricky to balance ease of access and flow so that the player could reach areas quickly while still being plausible. We went through a number of layout iterations for particularly where Mariken's study and the grotto cave were located to minimize backtracking.

We relied heavily on Houdini to speed iteration with the architecture, we kept the room as fairly simple grayblock, cutting in window shapes and deriving trim so we could still easily push around proportions as the rooms continued to shrink to fit the narrative intent. This was especially important for Mariken's study as it could be adjusted as our main gameplay space while still fitting the surrounding terrain. It also empowered us to introduce systems like our decay system which introduced rot,wet, and frost to cover the architecture and props by means of vertex color and material parameter collections.

As more of the architecture settled we dug into the back stories of each of the characters, making sure that even if they shared the same area that each of them would have a corner that would reflect who they were as a person, such as Ras' painters palette and brushes. This was also when we fleshed in decoration for other supporting narrative, like the lone clog acting as an "adoption" shoe for departed Nils.

Stylized Texture Pipeline

Early in the game's development as we were experimenting with different artistic styles we came across a few articles where artist were using manually painted world space normals to embed brush stroke details into the texture. What really appealed to us was that is worked seamlessly with regular unreal lighting unlike some other more post process heavy solutions. Our main concern was that the burden of manually painting each model would drive the texturing cost up so I set about doing some prototyping.

Our initial solution was to use the tile sampler node in Substance designer to scatter the brush strokes. The main problem here was that we needed a way to guide the brush strokes to follow the surface, and correct for uv island orientation. We also had a problem with the brush strokes bleeding across UV islands as the strokes were scattered on the texture without a notion of the 3D geometry. It was also very processing heavy.

For the guiding issue, we created a comb map setup in painter so the artists could paint the surface to effectively groom a utility map of arrows with full artistic control. For the bleeding and heaviness, we shifted the brush strokes to only affect a position swatch which was then pushed into one of the user channels. The position map would then be used in a filter that could quickly process any number of channels to apply the brush strokes uniformly. Using painters anchor point system we placed an anchor point just prior to the brush stroke filtering enabling us to restore any areas where the brush strokes were bleeding incorrectly quickly and efficiently. Manual painting could be layered on top, allowing for an added artistic touch.

Early in development we were exporting the resulting world space textures to be baked into tangent space for use in engine as a separate step. Eventually we found an excellent world to tangent space converter that could be layered on top, speeding up iteration time.

The result was very artist friendly as they could employ any modelling and baking processes that they desired. We found with certain cloth patterns and character details required a slightly different setup but one that the process handily supported. In these cases it made more sense to do simple coloring with patterns as a base layer, applying the brush stroke filtering to a baked light and curvature layer applied as an overlay. The normal map and slight overlay gave the strong sense of brush painting without destroying the finer details. We could also apply the brush strokes to a noise texture and overlay it at a low opacity to give a slightly mottled look.