Pink Cow Dung Becomes Art in The Immortal John Triptych

Creating an immersive world demands more than just good storytelling; it requires architectural imagination. For the development of The Immortal John Triptych, a collection built from chopped-up Renaissance paintings, the challenge lay not in depicting history, but in constructing a navigable, engaging space where players could truly inhabit the absurdities of the era.

When diving into the interior design for games like Death of the Reprobate, I quickly realized that the simple act of removing a door was fraught with peril. Since the game world is made entirely from fragmented art, finding perfectly matched blank walls or avoiding confusing corridors was paramount. The goal was to craft environments that offered tantalizing dead ends without frustrating backtracking loops.

The initial quest for suitable assets proved challenging. While garden and courtyard paintings offered some tempting vistas, they were often filled with bloody doors, making them unsuitable for seamless stitching into a coherent game space. This led to an aimless browsing through museum catalogues, searching for the perfect, static backdrop that could serve as a functional dead end.

Six months into the process, a serendipitous discovery changed the entire trajectory of the design. While looking through museum archives, I stumbled upon a painting by Andreas Schelfhout, Binnenplaatsje (1820-1830). Though technically outside the strict boundaries of the Renaissance, its clean lines and open floor area presented an unexpected opportunity.

This discovery immediately unlocked new possibilities. The painting offered clear boundaries and a spacious environment—a perfect canvas that allowed me to redefine the game’s interior design. It provided the structural foundation needed for a major scene within The Immortal John Triptych.

As I worked to integrate this new piece, the focus shifted from mere aesthetics to interactive absurdity. Patching in figures and details required creative solutions. Rather than settling for static portraits, I sought out elements that could interact with the space. This led to adding dynamic characters—a man wielding a stick, an over-the-top Adam and Eve, and finally, a wonderfully rectangular bull.

The true moment of artistic surrender arrived when trying to animate a simple water feature within the scene. Adjusting the angle of the newly introduced bull proved unexpectedly revelatory. By manipulating the perspective, I discovered that the movement of water, combined with the bull’s position, could be redirected in an entirely unexpected way.

This led to the inevitable and hilarious conclusion: a puzzle involving a bucket full of pink cow excrement. The logic held up perfectly—the act of feeding the bull resulted in different colored outputs, which could then be collected and presented as a bucket of milkshake. It was a chaotic, yet perfectly integrated element that honored the game’s theme of embracing the ridiculous.

The Immortal John Triptych, for better or for worse, proved that sometimes the most intelligent creative act is allowing the artwork to lead you down the path of glorious absurdity. It was a journey where the pursuit of perfect design resulted in an unforgettable mess.