Shrine Pt.1 - Insignia and Concept Art

Moodboard for Shrine. Used PureRef

Shrine's insignia. Their identity was Asian Ghost Realm, inspired by various East Asian myths.

I tried many different symbols inspired by Japanese family crests, but the silhouette wasn't unique enough (too many round shapes). So I went with a Torii gate and something that resembled a kanji (Chinese) calligraphy letter.

As an Asian myself I loved all the various versions of common ghost or monster stories from East Asia. Many times even the same ghost would have a slightly variant version of the tale for each country.

Here you will see haunted masks, Two-tailed cat, ronin ghost who wanders forever, dokkebi/yasha, nine-tail fox from East Asian region.

We needed a constant AOE character so I thought maybe we could have screaming haunted masks.

I find Asian acting masks very interesting and was happy to be able to have these guys made.

Story of Nekomata is quite popular so I wanted to make sure to add this yokai to the roster. Also, we needed some proper cat units in the game.

While ninjas are a common fantasy, I really liked the version from Ragnarok Online and Sonic from One Punch Man.

I had imagined that this ninja was wrongfully claimed to betray his clan and like yakuza cutting off their fingers when exiting a team, both of his arms were cut and left to die from blood loss. I wanted to have a gap between the arm and shoulder.

I wanted her head to be decapitated, but I decided to go safe for regional reasons and just gave her a blood-stained scarf to hold the head and body together. I enjoyed imagining how each of the ghosts died.

Inspired by Rurouni Kenshin, yes

Asian version of a living armor.

Stories of a fox pretending to be a beautiful lady is a classic (nine-tail fox/kumiho). I first tried more geisha/kiseng approach.

Variation A

Variation B

Yozora was the name I picked since it means "night sky" which matched her dark, sad lore. Her arms are stained with her own blood and that's why it's red.
I had to keep the tail together because of the performance issue.

I was thinking of God of Life from mononoke hime when I made the masked-fox spirit. I wanted the snow element to be added so I added ice here and there.

VFX concept was part of my job as well, and sometimes I made the VFX myself using PopcornFX.

I liked the idea of a spirit gate that connected the real world to the spirit world. It's a shrine itself and not necessarily evil. It would summon melee and ranged units, which was made by painting a new texture on Brute and Fiend mercenaries.

I wanted to make sure the unit can fall apart satisfyingly, since it was the first structure/non-moving unit we've had in the game.

For the Hell Gate I wanted to really push the menacing, cursed look. Once the white holy rope is now stained with blood from the bleeding pillars.