Knowing that we wanted a character to have to let go of tradition and evolve into something out of necessity gave us this opportunity to tell a fictional story of a new kind of warrior. While there are some stealthy assassins that actually appear from various points in history, there wasn’t a lot of information about the first warrior of that kind. In the early drawing boards for Jin, we knew that we needed someone that can fulfill the fantasy of hiding in the shadows, but still having a look that feels like it was inspired by some of his samurai armor and aesthetic. The general process was to get a brief narrative of the character, doing research and reference gathering, coming up with some thumbnail sketches, rounds of iterations, and reworks to address any technical issues we faced. Once the actors are cast, we fit their faces onto the outfit designs and from there they do an amazing job capturing the personality and nuances of the character through their lens.

This helps with finding and casting the actors later. We try to invoke a personality fit for the character on the face as well as provide references for the general tone the character should give off. Usually the concepts for characters are done well before the actors are cast. We spent a lot of time gathering reference material for our characters, which ranged from Samurai films, online books and resources, to photographing museum exhibits, from the most intricate Samurai and lavish armor, down to poor and rough bandits. A lot of the references we gathered were from museum exhibits and photos taken by teams that the studio sent out to Tsushima as well as the main island of Japan. We began by exposing ourselves to as much research and content as we could on the Kamakura Era, Japanese culture, old Samurai films and the Invasion of Tsushima, which led to the final designs of our characters, outfits, landscape, architecture, etc. This was the core player fantasy that served as an overarching guide for everyone at the studio. Our main story inspiration was the Mongol invasion of Japan of 1274, and the main character was a survivor of that invasion who defies all odds to defend his homeland. Ghost of Tsushima is set in 1274 during the Kamakura period, which comes with a lot of challenges as well as interesting opportunities to explore visual designs for the game. Hi! My name is Ian Jun Wei Chiew, Lead Concept Artist at Sucker Punch Productions, and I was fortunate enough to have worked on Ghost of Tsushima since the very beginning.

Ghost of tsushima art