Cosima Ballesteros

Art direction, interface and everything that makes a game look good on Steam.

NECROMARCH: a necromancer in a dark robe stands in an evening landscape under a violet sky.

Case study · Creative Lead

A necromancer who has to take the field himself.

NECROMARCH is a turn-based tactics game in the vein of Advance Wars, built in Godot 4 by a two-person team. I wrote and owned the visual direction — from palette and board readability to the entire interface and the Steam presence — in eight weeks to the public demo.

Play the demo on Steam

Art direction

Visual spec, the «cold look» in violet-grey and bone, type system.

UI / UX

Battle HUD, unit cards, menus, a tactical overlay atlas for ranges and intents.

Steam

Capsule art, logo, screenshots, GIFs, demo trailer and store copy.

World & maps

Faction colours, corpse families, spell VFX, tilesets and map building.

From first draft to the cold look

First capsule version «Undead Lord»: a necromancer against a warm sunset.
v1 · July — working title «Undead Lord»
Final NECROMARCH capsule: a necromancer raising a skeleton in cold evening light.
v3 · August — drawn entirely by me, logo included

Pixelled by hand

Portraits and the protagonist, drawn pixel by pixel: 16 × 16 pixels, shown eight times larger.

From the game

Tactical view: undead and enemy units on a grid, coloured tiles showing ranges and threats, the HUD with health, mana and spells on the right.
HUD & tactical overlay atlas
Dialogue scene in front of a castle: Thy Sire commands «Princess Guinevere, the sorceress. Bring me her death.»
Dialogue as a parchment decree
Mass raise: glowing teal spells raise undead among soldiers, three mausoleums below.
Consistent spell VFX
Mission intro: a ruined graveyard at dusk, with the text «They come to return you to the grave. Show them what you brought out of it.»
Mission intro with parallax

1 of 4

In motion

The first raiseA fallen soldier is raised again as a skeleton.
Mass raiseOne spell raises many undead at once.
Capturing and spending manaThe necromancer captures a mana well and spends the mana on spells.
The horde rolls inThe undead horde marches across the battlefield on command.

Credits — Unit and terrain sprites are based on King Rabbit’s Heroic Asset Series and the UI base on itchabop’s StoneBase; recoloured, extended and integrated by me. Capsule art, logo, HUD design, overlay atlas, trailer, the protagonist and its sprites, and the portraits of the protagonist and Thy Sire are my own work.

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