The Making of Disco Elysium - Part Four: Art

TL;DR

Disco Elysium's art director Aleksander Rostov treated the entire game as a painting, using portraiture, symbolism, and isometric composition as its true creative foundation.

Key Points

• 1.Rostov is a self-taught Estonian artist who grew up post-Soviet collapse, where artists lost cultural prestige overnight; his distrust of institutions shaped his belief that "art must be done outside of institutions."
• 2.The tiny art team consisted of Rostov, 3D artist Siim Raidma, concept artist Kaspar Tamsalu, junior artist Markus Härma, character sculptor Pavel "Pasha" Kuba, and sole animator Eduardo Rubio.
• 3.The pipeline ran through Blender and Unity: Blender produced color maps, normal maps, height maps, and "clown maps" (unique colors per object), which Rostov then painted over on a Wacom Cintiq.
• 4.Martinaise's exterior contains roughly 10 gigapixels of texture data; to avoid loading screens, Siim built a virtual texturing system using the third-party plugin Amplify Texture 2 — whose creators later became ZA/UM porters.
• 5.Lighting uses three pre-rendered shadow directions (morning, noon, evening) stored in RGB channels of a PNG; a last-minute decision to flip the noon sun to cast buildings in shadow dramatically increased contrast.
• 6.The "living world" effect comes from layered tricks: parallax-scrolling treetops, foreground buildings silhouetting as you approach, an animated fog-of-war that snakes into tile cracks, rotating fans, and bug particle effects.
• 7.Character portraits use deliberate symbolic geometry — Kim Kitsuragi gets warm circles (wholeness, no weak corners), Jean Vicquemare gets rotten black rectangles — communicating emotion directly without the player noticing consciously.
• 8.Harry Du Bois's ever-changing face is partly an autodidact's inability to draw the same face twice, but Rostov reframes it as the protagonist's shifting self-image, with his first portrait being a Francis Bacon-style mystery figure.