"Lin, Mr. Francis Bacon wants you to come over and take a look."
Lin Lixin, who was working with a group of literary scholars on the tone of the text, was called out by Lucas.
"Huh? Has the old gentleman exhausted his artistic talent?"
Lin Lixin casually put down what he was carrying and followed Lucas out of the house.
Under Francis Bacon's insistence, even Lin Lixin and his men had no choice but to let the old man vent his frustrations and personally lead the army.
That guy shouted something like "I must write it myself," leaving the younger generation aside, and plunged headlong into the ocean of creation.
If Lin Lixin hadn't sent someone to Cedars-Sinai to bring over the entire medical team, he probably would have been worried all the time that the old man would suddenly die in the manor.
Fortunately, the other party was a reasonable person.
At Lin Lixin's insistence, after much persuasion, I finally agreed to be responsible for drawing the main concept art for the cover poster.
He will personally guide the art team to take over the remaining work after he has had his fill.
As an "art director," he doesn't actually need to do everything himself.
"I suppose so... Mr. Bacon was certainly quite skilled at improvisation." Lucas nodded helplessly.
Artists are always like this; they generally all have their own inner world.
Or rather, they're a group of guys whose mental state isn't exactly mainstream.
This was especially true of Francis Bacon.
According to him, he never bothers to spend a lot of time making drafts when creating art.
Often, it's a flash of inspiration, a burst of creativity that leads to swift writing.
Sometimes, if everything goes smoothly, it's even possible to finish a draft in a single day.
Although it will take some time before it is finalized.
But for an artist, this is practically a fucking superpower.
That's an oil painting!
This isn't just scribbling on scrap paper!
"Honestly, I really didn't expect the old gentleman to understand what you wanted in just a few words. I even feel that his understanding of this project is much deeper than mine." Lucas led Lin Lixin into the car and drove towards another small mansion not far away.
This area was temporarily set up for the art team.
After all, this project has a large amount of 2D assets, so Industrial Light & Magic's involvement was very limited, while the demand for artists was very high.
Considering the frequent arguments within the development department, and also due to the strong demands of Bacon.
They were given a separate office space here.
It sits by the lake, almost across from Skywalker Sound.
The studio had been completely cleared out; apart from a few workstations and scanners in a separate room, most of the space was filled with art supplies.
Only in the main hall area did the group of painters quietly copy the painting, trying to decipher the almost insane and distorted horror that Mr. Bacon left on the canvas.
When Lin Lixin saw what was on the canvas, he felt a buzzing in his head.
It felt like being suddenly and solidly hit by a cannonball.
In an instant, goosebumps covered my skin. It was a crooked tree, dry and rotten, lying across the muddy ground during the thawed season, with several piles of snow shoveled next to the wooden fence, waiting for spring to arrive and melt.
The brushstrokes throughout the painting are remarkably bold and unrestrained.
While retaining the foundation of realism, the colors are painted in an extremely dirty and distorted manner.
Lucas leaned closer and examined the tree carefully.
"Oh great, so you drew a hanged ghost. Who is he? The victim in the main case?"
A corpse was hanging from the withered branches of the tree, which had lost its crown.
A corpse dressed in a police detective uniform.
Lucas.
Lin Lixin called out to him and followed him to the canvas.
This painting is slightly different from the style of the Peredvizhniki in Disco Elysium that I remembered.
but...
It has completely transformed into another level. It is a projection of the artist's inner world.
"This is... the player himself?"
It was me.
Bacon was wheeled closer by the caregiver and nodded laboriously.
"When I was young, I was passionate about visualizing people's negative emotions such as fear, loneliness, and distress, and turning them into my works."
"And those things, without my noticing, had grown into a large tree."
"An unhealthy, twisted, sickly tree."
"And now, cough cough..."
He coughed violently a few times, the sound of his lungs tearing apart inch by inch clearly audible in his head.
"Now I am in it, listening to my own decay and turmoil."
Those things he once used as material are now being projected onto him with crystal clarity.
Loneliness, fear, illness, restlessness.
It wasn't until he picked up his paintbrush again that Bacon truly realized his own violent yet fragile inner self.
Suffering from severe asthma since childhood, along with his unusual sexual orientation and dressing style, led to him being kicked out of his family's home at a young age.
After leaving Ireland, he traveled between London, Berlin, and Paris throughout the 1920s.
He witnessed ww2 and experienced his lover dying from a drug overdose just before the opening of his art exhibition.
The only difference between him and other great painters is that he had already achieved fame before his physical death.
Despite being highly controversial.
"Perfect."
Lin Lixin gazed at the painting silently for a long while before uttering a single word.
"Mr. Bacon, you would be the most suitable art director for this work. I am very fortunate to have your involvement."
He's practically a quintessential Disco Elysium character.
"Are there any art supplies here?" Lin Lixin suddenly became interested as he listened to the experience points pounding in his head.
The core of Disco Elysium is indeed filled with tragedy.
But it wasn't truly a completely collapsed ruin.
It contains a faint, absurd, and insignificant hope, but it truly exists there.
"You know this trick?"
Lucas was somewhat surprised to see Lin Lixin rubbing his hands together, seemingly preparing to start writing.
Lin did demonstrate his hand-drawing skills, but oil painting is a completely different field.
"Just learned it."
Lin Lixin spent the entire afternoon in his studio, trying to bring the idea in his mind to life on paper.
There were some stumbles at the beginning.
After all, the experience bar was still slowly increasing. But with Bacon constantly nagging beside him, the experience points were skyrocketing.
In the end, Lin Lixin drew the entire picture with such ease and fluency that it was as easy as eating and drinking.
What is this?
Lucas, having circled back, saw this masterpiece as soon as he entered the room.
The lake during the turbid, frost-prone period.
Tall reeds cover the area.
And... a strange-looking insect.
" Insulindian Phasmid."
"Oh, it's a stick insect, but it's huge!"
Lucas suddenly realized that this thing matched the stick insect he remembered.
Stick insects, order α, are an endangered species of insect.
Because of its unique ability to mimic, it has appeared in many fields such as literature and entertainment. But the stick insect in this painting is a head taller than a person.
Its enormous body, resembling bamboo joints, is paired with slender limbs, and of course, eyes that seem to hold the Starfield.
They're like fantastical creatures straight out of a fairy tale.
Compared to Bacon's chilling depiction of the Hanged Man, this picture gave him a completely different feeling.
"So what does this mean? What imagery does it represent?"
Lucas.
Bacon suddenly placed his hand on Lucas's arm, signaling him to stop asking questions.
Let the players have the right to interpret it.
As he spoke, a strange glint appeared in his eyes as he looked at the painting.
This is an inner projection of idealism.
It's almost the complete opposite of the tone of his utterly corrupt works.
But only by putting them together, within the same game, will this world truly be complete. "Uh... okay."
A group of mentally ill people.
Lucas had never felt so strange before.
This place looks exactly like a religious ceremony.
He just wanted to leave as soon as possible.
I'd rather work with Infocom and their team tinkering with code.
Lin Lixin dropped what he was holding and stood up.
"I should go now; I need to catch up on other development work."
"Aren't you going to keep an eye on the art department anymore? Didn't you say it was very important?"
"That's true, but we have Mr. Bacon; he'll handle it."
Back to the development team. "Sorry for the time delay, let's get back to what we discussed yesterday, the issue of property design."
As Lin Lixin spoke, he picked up the dice from the table.
"Although I believe everyone has been quite tormented by its artistic aspects these past few days, it is still a game after all."
No matter what, a video game must ultimately come down to its core element: "Fun".
How can one make a game out of a work that is full of satire, metaphors, philosophical speculation, artistry, and literary merit, and whose sheer volume of text would make someone with reading difficulties dizzy?
All the answers point in the same direction.
Do you remember what I said when we first started this project?
"RPG elements."
Tim chimed in.
When he saw the dice in Lin Lixin's hand, he already had some general guesses in his mind.
"Exactly! This is a CRPG game, and we need to design the game's 'gameplay' around that."
What exactly is the source of gameplay? Different works offer different perspectives on this.
For this game, the answer is... interactivity.
Or rather, maneuverability.
"I have read an excerpt from 'Lin's Design Theory - Game Architecture Design Theory (Part 1)' and noticed that you summarized the basic needs of game players into 12 types: exploration, control, growth, role-playing, collection, social interaction, performance, challenge... These can all be sources of gameplay in games, right?"
"Huh?"
Lin Lixin was taken aback, then patted Tim on the shoulder.
You wouldn't guess that this guy with thick eyebrows and big eyes is a theorist.