Making a VERY belated thread of some of the stuff I did for Half-Life: Alyx!

First off, concepts for young Alyx—you don’t see her in game, but we wanted to figure out how she might look: five years younger than HL2, but still maintaining some familiar elements/items of clothing.

A couple of my favourite thumbnails from our key art brainstorming sessions, the second of which was painted up into a full piece by the lovely Chris Welch:

(...please ignore the tangent behind the L, it haunts me)

Channeling Alyx for her little doodles of potential Dog upgrades in the hideout:

SO much of my work on this game was just adding additional little design details to City 17, which was a blast.

I could probably write a whole dang thread about finding joy in the deceptively mundane aspects of world-building at some point, but for now: it rules!! try it.

For instance: loved the challenge of designing mid-tier wine labels that are trying to look fancier than they are.

I also now know WAY too much about regional food regulations, but I hope players who read Russian appreciate the details when they're sloshing around those bottles:

Some big ol' self-indulgent murals for City 17:

City 17 safety posters—had to do at least one classy one and one EXTREMELY gruesome one, as is tradition. Surprising no one, I got very good at hand-lettering Cyrillic after working on Alyx.

And finally all of the Vortigaunt's wall art, which was super fun to figure out a style for:

This led to designing the vort's big puzzle mural, which was a daunting undertaking from a narrative standpoint, but it gave me a solid excuse to replay HL1/HL2 at the beginning of last year:

Aaaaaand PHEW finishing up with my commentary node where I talk about our thought process behind the vort mural: