“In 2190, a catastrophic global war has devastated the planet; many modern technologies have been lost, leading to a revival of more archaic and medieval lifestyle, technology, and thinking.

North America has been reduced to rubble, and remnants of the former US war with each other for supremacy and survival. Most savage and dreadful of them all, the Technate of America wages a brutal war of conquest across the continent, craving to reclaim a long lost destiny and dominate the ruined world.

The Technate, lead, governed, operated, and commanded by a rogue sentient AI, uses powers and science that defies morality and reality in pursuit of its ambition, and for the service of dark malevolent forces that delight in suffering and carnage.

A lone wanderer, clad in chainmail and black leather, bearing a golden mask and burdened past, is the last chance humanity has to overthrow the Machine Despot, and be freed of its evil—if he can even free himself of it.“

From the general aesthetic and particularly the small premise above, a massive inspiration in conceptualizing and developing the project was dark fantasy and sword-and-sorcery type media; in particular: Warhammer 40k, Berserk, Conan, and Excalibur.

I took these inspirations into my first step of making a “gesture model” using a free online character-builder called HeroForge to quickly get an outline of what I wanted my characters to look like. I also collected images of environments, manga panels, and movie frames to establish a general aesthetic I wanted to aim for and emulate in the project.