DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations - The Flay

The Flay:
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The Sewn together skin and flesh of every challenger who entered his arena and failed.
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“What at first appeared to be decorative elements or shades…. In reality it was a thousand years of skin, a thousand miles long”
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As with the exterior to the Hell Colosseum; in the early blu-sky phase of production on the DLC for Dark Ages we had the chance to explore ideas. As one of my tasks was to imagine what a Hell Colosseum could be; Iteration linked below, one of the exciting challenges was how to make this interesting and unique from a design perspective.
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I wound up fixating on the idea of the drawn shades you often see in work depicting ancient colosseums and their purpose: Protect against sunlight and other atmospheric elements. I felt that wasn’t really needed in hell because…hell. So how can we build an interesting narrative and story around this? So this became the core of my journey exploring the design story.
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It made sense of the gate they would be skin but if not needed for sun production, why are they there? Then I started exploring the idea of one single , long ‘quilt’ of flesh sewn together. This become the background of the one who hosts the tournaments here (gameplay idea at the time) and of course he would love to have new challengers to claim victory over. As hell is hell and it seems like everyone knows of and fears the DOOM Slayer after he defeated Ahazrack at the end of Dark Ages.
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To help sell the narrative I also did a quick storyboard of their first meeting. All and all it was a fun process and as it was part of my job, coming up with a solid design story through narrative to back up the design choices. Ultimately we didn’t go in this direction but it was still worth 100% of the effort that went in with the time we were given.
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Colosseum iterations here:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/b0ao1m
Art Director Emerson Tung:
https://www.artstation.com/emersontung