Masque of Red Death is based on the poem "The Masque of Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe. In the original story there are several key elements that we were pulling from: The main character Prospero, Red Death, as well as the rooms and colors of the mansion.
Prospero in the original story was a rich noble who was throwing a masquerade party during a pandemic called the Red Death. In the story, Red Death manifests as a person who hunts Prospero through 7 rooms in his mansion, each with a different color and each representing a different part of his life.
In our version, Prospero is a rich CEO. The mansion has been exchanged for a tall office building with a gothic aesthetic, each floor representing a room from the original story. For scope reasons, we mainly focused on 3 levels and thus 3 colors: Blue, Yellow, and Red.
Level 1 Sketch
Level 1 Concept
Level 1 was our introduction to the game. We wanted to start off the game relatively grounded, staying in traditional office spaces and becoming more surreal and blue as the level went on. The first level was meant to represent the CEO's intern stage of getting to where he was now. The level would feature a series of breakrooms where the CEO would make coffees to give to his bosses. Each breakroom would get weirder and weirder until the whole level was a surreal mess. I attempted to create this by messing with the scale of everyday items and pushing the achromatic color scheme to make the blue pop.
Level 2 Sketch
Level 2 Concept
Level 2 represented our CEO character's time in the trenches behind a desk. The idea was to make this level feel overbearing and make the player feel smallpo. I pushed the scale again, creating absurdly tall stacks of paper and filing cabinets to create what almost reads as a city in the background.
Level 3 Conference Room
Level 3 Hill of Bodies
Level 3 Ending
Level 3 was going to be our most cinematic level with the least gameplay. At this point in the story, the CEO is going through a maze of meeting rooms and ultimately arrives at his office where he must climb a large pile of all the people he has stepped on to get to where he is. He would be greeted by Red Death and accept his end. The main color here was obviously red, a departure from the original story where the final color is black.
Level 1 Death Screen Concept
Level 2 Death Screen Concept
Level 3 Death Screen Concept
Though we ultimately didn't end up using this as the end scree, this concept played with an early idea of what would happen if the player was caught by Red Death too early. The idea of Red Death dragging the player down into nothingness manifested itself in my mind as an eldritch creature dragging down its prey into a watery abyss so I tried to capture that for a potential death screen. The open mask was a test concept where Red Death's mask would open up to eat the player but we ended up not going with for simplicity sake.
Below are mock-ups with text to visualize how the illustration would look with UI.
Level 1 Death Screen w/ Text
Level 2 Death Screen w/ Text
Level 3 Death Screen w/ Text
Blue Window Designs
Yellow Window Designs
Red Window Designs
Different iterations exploring the potential window designs to be used throughout the levels and colored for each of the levels to help visualize how they would look. Early iterations were more simple, taking inspiration from church windows. Later iterations were more complicated and I tried to incorporate the character of Red Death in a more stained glass design.
Office Building Concept
Wall Concepts
Wall w/ Window Reference Concepts
The base of the building was heavily inspired by the empire state building mixed with elements of gothic architecture. We wanted the exterior and interior to feel gothic but also recognizable as a modern fixture so pairing these elements was an interesting challenge. We also wanted the environment to become more gothic as the player progressed through the levels so to visualize how that would look I did mock-ups for each level's version of the walls to see where detail could go and see how far we could push certain elements.
Cover Page Illustration
Welcome Page
Story Page
We planned on creating an art bible to step through our process. My concepts as well as these illustrations were to be included for the Cover Page, Welcome Page and Story Page respectively.
Masque of Red Death is a 3D puzzle platformer based off of the short story of the same name by Edgar Allen Poe. Masque of Red Death follows a CEO whose life flashes before his eyes as he runs through a surrealist office building in an attempt to escape the inevitable, Death himself.
I was responsible for creating environment concept art in Photoshop, modeling in-game assets in Autodesk Maya, as well as lighting the game in Unreal Engine 5
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