Hi, everyone! I’m LUKA, and I’m here to share my experience as an illustrator on my first official indie game, called Greda Inferno.

It all started at the Abstract Chile Game Jam, with a team of four people—just for fun, really. We wanted to try it out, and that’s where Donde la Cami was born—a game about an old man from Pomaire who sculpts clay, and you basically have to complete his commissions. Here, I focused on being practical and creating an aesthetic that was simple yet inviting, with touches of humor, and where everything reflected Chilean icons... So, I chose a cartoon style for this project (photos 2–4).

The results of the Jam were great; we won an honorable mention, people liked the game, and the question was: What do we do now? We wanted to keep going, but it had to evolve, and that’s where Greda Inferno was born. The programmer started sharing his ideas with me, and with the freedom he gave me, I had to decide on the visual identity of this project that was taking shape. The answer came to me almost immediately—my childhood, Cartoon Network from the early 2000s. I wanted to pay homage to all those shows that had left a mark on my life in some way, and that’s what I decided to do, so I got to work right away.

Now the story took an interesting turn: the old man who made vases was in hell—a hell that would be a mix of Dante Alighieri’s and Tatooine. I took those two concepts, established the style, and above all that feeling that everything is askew, as if it’s fine but something doesn’t quite add up—and the first concept was born: the interior of Nestor’s house, our protagonist. From there, I defined the color palette—quite monochromatic, with bold reds that would taint all the other colors, expressing how everything is consumed by the environment (photo 5).

But it wasn’t all going to be about the background; the characters also had to embody the essence of that concept and that bizarre vibe that Cartoon Network used to have. And the first one emerged, the Shop Clerk, based on the Mask (photos 6-7), and from there the rest came together almost by inertia (photos 8-9).

This is just the beginning of the journey; we’ve worked hard on this project, and I’d like to share more about this entire fascinating creative process and the decisions I made to bring it to life.

Greda Inferno: The Beginning of My Journey as an Indie Illustrator