One Game, Six Countries, One Visual Identity
Art Direction Lessons from Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
Target keyword: art direction game environments multiple locations
Giza. Vatican. Himalayas. Sukhothai. Shanghai. Each with its own architecture, its own light, its own thousand years of history. And yet, the moment a player steps into any of these locations in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, there's no question which game they're in.
That coherence doesn't happen by accident. It's the result of deliberate art direction decisions made early, maintained consistently, and communicated clearly enough to hold across five years of production, six distinct geographies, and sixty-plus environment concepts. Here's what that actually looks like from the inside.
The Problem Nobody Talks About: Visual Identity at Scale
The obvious challenge in a game with many real-world locations is accuracy: getting the architecture right, the period details correct, the cultural references respectful and grounded. That part gets a lot of attention.
The harder problem gets less attention: once every location is historically accurate and visually distinct, what stops the game from feeling like six different worlds stitched together?
This is the art direction problem that sits underneath everything else on a project like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Nuen Studio worked with MachineGames from 2020 through the game's release in 2025, producing over 60 environment concepts across the game's major locations. Over that time, the question we kept returning to wasn't "does this look like Giza?" It was "does this still look like Indy?"
Those are different questions, and the gap between them is where art direction lives.
Principle 1: The Occupation Layer Is the Glue
The single most powerful tool for visual consistency across Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn't a color palette or a lighting rule. It's the Nazi occupation.
Every location in the game has been touched by the same antagonist force: the same equipment, the same crates and signage, the same military infrastructure imposed onto whatever existed before. This occupation layer functions as a visual constant that travels with the player across every geography. A player who learns to read the visual language of a Nazi-occupied space in Giza will recognize that same language in the Vatican, even though the underlying architecture is completely different.
For a concept artist, this creates a specific and interesting challenge. The job isn't just to research what a location looks like. It's to find the most compelling way to layer military occupation onto ancient or sacred space in a way that feels historically plausible and visually interesting at the same time. A field bunker carved into the base of a pyramid reads completely differently from one tucked behind the columns of a cathedral, but both immediately communicate the same world.
Getting this right meant thinking about occupation not as decoration applied on top of a finished environment, but as something that changes the environment structurally. Where would they build? What would they commandeer? What would they leave intact because it served their purposes, and what would they modify? These questions drove the concept work as much as any reference photo.
Principle 2: Research Is the Starting Point, Not the Destination
Every location in the game required genuine historical and architectural research before any concept work began. Not optional research, not surface-level reference gathering, but enough depth to understand why a space looks the way it does and how it would have been used.
This matters for two practical reasons. First, game designers and leads will catch significant historical errors, and correcting them late is expensive. Second, and more importantly, the most interesting visual opportunities in a real-world location are usually hidden inside its actual history. A space that was built for a specific purpose, adapted over centuries, and layered with use looks fundamentally different from a space that was designed to look old. That difference reads on screen.
But research is where the process starts, not where it ends. The next step, after understanding what a location actually is, is identifying what it can be inside a game. This is a different skill set. A historian asks what is accurate. A concept artist asks what is extraordinary, what creates the strongest sense of place in a single establishing shot, what gives a layout artist the most to work with.
For lesser-known locations like Sukhothai, this step requires more work than for somewhere like the Vatican. Players arrive at Giza with a mental image already formed. They arrive at Sukhothai with far less, which means the concept art has to do more of the work of making them feel somewhere specific and real.
Principle 3: Camera Angle and Light Are the "Voice" of a Location
Two locations can share similar architecture and still feel completely different based on how they're lit and from what angle they're seen. This is obvious in principle, but the implications for how concept art is produced are significant.
On Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Nuen delivered 3D block-outs alongside 2D concepts rather than 2D-only files. This distinction matters more for a multi-location project than for almost any other type of work.
When a concept exists only as a 2D painting, lighting and camera angle are embedded in the artwork itself. They look right in the concept and may or may not translate when a layout artist builds the actual space in engine. With a 3D block-out, the layout team can evaluate the space from multiple angles, test how in-engine lighting behaves within it, and make informed decisions before committing to a full build.
For a project spanning multiple geographies, this becomes a consistency tool as much as a production efficiency tool. The harsh, flat light of the Egyptian desert creates different challenges than the filtered light inside a European cathedral or the cold, reflective light of a snow-covered mountain pass. Understanding those differences as spatial and lighting problems, not just painterly ones, changes how environments are designed from the start rather than adjusted at the end.
Principle 4: An Art Bible Is a Living Document, Not a One-Time Deliverable
A project that runs five years across multiple production phases, with artists cycling in and out over time, cannot maintain visual consistency through memory or informal knowledge transfer. It requires documentation that's specific enough to be useful and flexible enough to stay relevant as the game evolves.
The mistake most often made with art bibles on long projects is treating them as a deliverable: something produced at the start of production, approved, and then referenced occasionally. On a project like this one, the art bible needs to function as a working tool that gets updated as production decisions are made and as the game's scope changes.
More importantly, the most useful art bibles describe feel rather than rules. A document that says "Egyptian locations should feel sun-bleached and ancient" gives an artist something to aim for. A document that only says "use warm color temperatures and desaturated stone textures" gives an artist constraints that may produce technically correct results that still feel wrong.
The practical approach that worked across Indiana Jones and the Great Circle's locations was anchoring each location's art bible section to specific visual examples rather than written descriptions alone. When a new artist needed to get up to speed on a location, they could look at approved concepts alongside the notes explaining why those concepts worked, rather than trying to interpret written guidelines cold.
What This Means If You're Briefing a Multi-Location Project
Multi-location projects are among the most demanding brief scenarios in environment concept art outsourcing, because the risks compound in both directions. A vendor who does strong work on one location can still produce results that don't hold together across five.
Based on our experience across Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, these are the questions worth answering before any concept work begins:
What is the one element that travels with the player across every location and makes this world recognizably itself? On this project it was the occupation layer. On other projects it might be a technology aesthetic, a natural phenomenon, or a recurring faction's visual language. If the answer isn't clear before briefing starts, it needs to be found before concept work does.
How will the art bible be maintained over the course of production, not just created at the start? Who owns updates, and what triggers them?
Shanghai’s destruction
Will the vendor be producing 3D block-outs alongside 2D concepts, or 2D only? For multi-location projects where layout teams need to build and light actual spaces, this decision affects the downstream pipeline significantly.
What is the clearest example of the visual identity you're trying to achieve, and can you put it in front of the concept team before the first brief is written?
The gap between a multi-location project that feels like one coherent world and one that feels like a collection of themed levels often comes down to how clearly these questions were answered before the first concept was ever started.