BATMAN ARKHAM ASSYLUM
On the art side our process began with us scouring the graphic novels for inspiration. We looked at the Batman comics down through the decades paying close attention to the Arkham specific books like the beautiful 'Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth', and 'Arkham Asylum: Living Hell'.
Arkham had never been visualised in its entirety before so the environment team had the big challenge of creating every nook and cranny of the island for the first time. Arkham Asylum is an amazing place to set a Batman game. It gave us not only an environment, that from a technical and game play standpoint was suited to our design, being of a finite, contained size with believable borders, but it also gave us a setting so rich in creepy, foreboding atmosphere that it was an artist's dream location.
The Art Director Dave Hego had a very strong vision that Arkham should be like a living breathing character in itself that changes as time passes, that slips from dark reality to darker nightmare as Batman slides into the Scarecrow sequences, and that evolves as The Joker's plan unfolds.
Arkham is an island with a history and its buildings reflect this in the way they have been adapted over time to suit the needs of the Asylum, the architecture of one era juxtaposed with that of the next. This layering of architecture creates the richness and uniqueness you see in the game, from the Gothic architecture of the Main Hall, to the Victorian style of the glasshouses, to the dingy industrial warehouse feel of high security.
"We tried to use real places where possible as reference for our environments," explains Dave Hago, "an example of this being The Arkham Botanical Gardens which are inspired by the Palm House at Kew Gardens in South London.
The environment team spent time there gathering reference material in the beautiful Victorian glasshouses. We found this type of exercise invaluable in creating highly detailed environments that had a feeling of authenticity. We also used Alcatraz the real world equivalent of Arkham as another source of inspiration."
-Rocksteady-
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