IntoGames & Jagex Future Talents Game Jam
Art Challenge Entry
For this game jam, I decided to focus specifically on the Art Challenge, creating a complete concept package for an original Old School RuneScape-inspired questline. Rather than creating a playable game, I wanted to concentrate on what I currently feel most confident exploring as a Games Design student: 2D art, character design, and world buuilding. The challenge also allowed me to newly explore some environment design, and narrative design for the first time.
As a Year 1 Games Design student currently specialising more heavily in 2D art, I did not yet feel confident enough with programming to create a full playable game or demo. Instead of allowing that to limit what I could create, I decided to take the art challenge as an opportunity to go much further with the creative and conceptual side of the brief.
I ended up going somewhat overboard with the deliverables! What started as an art challenge became a fully developed quest concept, complete with a village, characters, boss, portal designs, quest narrative, character biographies, environmental descriptions, example dialogue, maps and a large collection of development artwork.
The project ended up developing quite organically, with each part inspiring the next. Below is a breakdown of how I developed the project.
Creating the Quest Line
The The very first thing I created was the quest narrative.
I wanted to create something that felt like it could belong within Old School RuneScape, particularly its slightly ridiculous sense of humour. I love the way RuneScape quests can begin with what sounds like an incredibly serious situation before slowly revealing that things are nowhere near as dramatic as they initially appeared.
I wanted to capture that feeling in my own quest.
The basic premise revolves around an elderly mage named Paige who believes that a powerful dark wizard has stolen her incredibly important magical relic and is planning to unleash great peril upon Gielinor.
Of course, things aren’t quite what they seem…
Creating the narrative first gave me a foundation to build everything else around. Once I knew the story and the sort of humour I wanted, I could start thinking about the characters who would inhabit it.
Paige the Mage
The first character I created was Paige the Mage, the eccentric NPC quest giver at the centre of the story.
Paige is a kind elderly mage and witch who is every bit as enthusiastic as she is unhinged. She claims to be a high-tier master of the mystic arts, although her most impressive apparent ability is her supernatural inability to speak in a sentence that doesn’t somehow rhyme with her own name.
She also proudly wears what she insists are her “mystical sage robes”…
They are, in fact, beige…
Paige is profoundly colour blind and apparently sees absolutely no issue with this.
She carries a basic staff and wears a plain black wizard’s hat, but despite her rather unimpressive appearance, she is completely convinced that she is an immensely powerful mage.
I wanted Paige’s design to immediately communicate that she was elderly, eccentric and slightly chaotic while still fitting within the stylised, semi-realistic visual language of Old School RuneScape.
I experimented with her proportions, clothing, silhouette and facial features before moving into more refined linework.
I then developed the final colour version and created additional views so that Paige could be understood as a potential game asset rather than simply a finished illustration.
Paige the Mage’s Quest
Paige’s life has been thrown into complete chaos after her “Legendary Lost Relic of Boundless Power” mysteriously disappears.
According to Paige, it has been stolen by a powerful dark wizard who intends to bring “great peril” and a “most terrible plague” to Gielinor.
She recruits the player to enter The Great Cage and retrieve her stolen relic.
The reality is considerably less dramatic.
Paige is simply a wonderfully confused and senile resident of the Mage’s Retreat with a very overactive imagination, and she has transformed an everyday nuisance into what she believes is a world-ending crisis.
Spoiler Alert: her legendary lost relic is actually just a painted rock.
This became one of my favourite parts of the quest because it allowed me to lean into the sort of ridiculous reveal that I associate with RuneScape’s humour.
Tammy the Hammy
Once Paige was established, I started thinking about who this supposedly terrifying dark wizard could actually be.
I wanted the reveal to be completely ridiculous while still making sense within the story.
Then I had the idea:
What if the dark wizard was actually just a gigantic hamster wearing a wizard hat?And so Tammy the Hammy was born.
Tammy is a literal oversized giant hamster who walks around on all fours. She has no magical abilities, cannot speak and has absolutely no interest in world domination. She simply happens to wear a discarded, tattered wizard hat that she presumably scavenged from somewhere and has developed a habit of hoarding anything shiny.
Her primary interests are eating huge quantities of vegetation, running through giant plastic tubes and collecting things that catch her eye.
From Paige’s perspective, Tammy is a sinister, silent arch-nemesis: a cold-hearted sorcerer who has engineered a gigantic metallic fortress called The Great Cage to hide her stolen treasure.
To everyone else in Gielinor, Tammy is just a very large, very confused rodent.
She happened to wander near Paige’s home, saw Paige’s shiny crystal core and decided that it would look fantastic buried in the bedding of her nest.
She then waits inside The Great Cage, completely unaware that she is apparently supposed to be the final boss.
I imagined Tammy as a level 67 subterranean dungeon boss, even though I wasn’t creating the playable encounter itself.
Designing Tammy was particularly fun because I could deliberately make her look much less threatening than the story initially suggests. Her enormous size and wizard hat communicate “boss”, while her actual behaviour communicates “giant hamster who has absolutely no idea what’s happening.” But in keeping with the amusement, once the player takes her precious crystal core that she hoarded she does actually turn aggressive at level 67.
Creating Mage’s Retreat
It was actually the characters that gave me the idea for the environment.
After creating Paige and Tammy, I started thinking about where a character like Paige would actually live.
If Paige was an elderly, slightly senile retired witch, surely she wouldn’t be the only one. This led me to the idea of a retirement village for old, washed-up and slightly eccentric wizards, witches and mages.
And that became the Mage’s Retreat.
The Mage’s Retreat is tucked away in a set of hills that mysteriously appear when the player enters a magical portal near Draynor Manor.
It is essentially where old witches, wizards and mage’s go to retire.
The village is home to washed-up wizards, witches and mages who insist that they almost became Archmage, while spending their retirement reminiscing about the “good old days” when their fireballs were bigger, didn’t miss and their knees didn’t ache.
Because the village was created after the characters and narrative, I already had a strong idea of the tone I wanted it to have.
It needed to feel magical, but also cosy, slightly chaotic and a little bit ridiculous.
I drew heavily from existing magical locations and objects within RuneScape, including Arceuus, Magic Trees, Magic Logs, Draynor Village, Draynor Manor and the Wizards’ Tower. I wanted the Mage’s Retreat to feel as though it could genuinely exist somewhere within Gielinor while still being a new location with its own identity.
I explored different layouts and considered how the player would move through the village, where the important characters would be positioned and how the environment could support the quest.
I eventually developed both overhead and first-person concepts.
Community Soup
At the heart of the village sits an enormous bubbling cauldron filled with a mysterious green liquid.
Not particularly mysterious, as it turns out.
It’s Community Soup.
Nobody seems particularly willing to explain what is actually in it, but brave adventurers can fill a vial once per day and use it to restore a small amount of health.
The village also includes market stalls, cosy cottages and a rune and magic shop selling runes, staffs and other arcane supplies.
Players can wander through the village, listen to the residents reminisce about their glory days, or climb up the hillside to find Paige sitting on a large boulder overlooking the settlement.
The map also shows the locations of important NPCs and quest elements, including Paige, the portal and the route towards The Great Cage.
Looking east from the village, the scenery becomes much stranger.
On the horizon sits The Great Cage, Tammy’s enormous “metallic fortress”.
Towering piles of straw hide a well-concealed key somewhere nearby, giving the peaceful retirement village a rather unexpected dungeon entrance.
The Great Cage
Once I had established the Mage’s Retreat, I could start thinking about the location where the player’s confrontation with Tammy would take place.
The Great Cage is intended to contrast heavily with the cosy village.
Rather than a traditional wizard’s dungeon, it is essentially a gigantic metallic hamster enclosure that Paige has somehow interpreted as an intimidating fortress created by a dark sorcerer.
I wanted this location to continue the joke established by Tammy’s character: the more seriously Paige takes it, the more ridiculous it actually is.
The Jackalope
The magical woodland surrounding the Mage’s Retreat also gave me an opportunity to create an additional creature.
This became the Jackalope.
My design was heavily inspired by the Jackalopes found in RuneScape 3, with additional influence from the Jackalope in Red Dead Redemption.
However, I didn’t want to simply recreate those existing designs.
I wanted these Jackalopes to feel like something completely new that had appeared alongside this mysterious magical region.
I also added gold diamond-shaped markings across their bodies, giving them an ancient Aztec-inspired appearance and helping to suggest that these creatures are connected to the magical energy of the forest.
The finished Jackalope has a very different appearance from the more traditional RuneScape creatures that inspired it. I wanted the bright white, gold and turquoise palette to make them feel almost ethereal when placed amongst the darker woodland.
Despite being peaceful and non-hostile, players can still choose to attack them for Magic combat training, collecting rabbit meat and bones, with a chance of receiving a rare Astral Rune drop.
Which is perhaps a little cruel considering how cute I made them.
The Portals
The portal serves as the gateway between the existing RuneScape world and the hidden Mage’s Retreat.
I created three different portal iterations, each exploring a different way of communicating magic while remaining consistent with the Old School RuneScape visual style. All three designs use a vibrant turquoise portal, simple geometric forms and low-poly construction.
Portal Iteration 1
The first design explored a nature-inspired entrance, using a hexagonal portal framed by Magic Logs and the bare trunks of Magic Trees.
Small glowing yellow magical stars surround the portal, inspired by the sparkles seen around OSRS Magic Trees.
Portal Iteration 2
The second iteration expanded on the first by replacing the bare trunks with two full Magic Trees. This created a much stronger silhouette and helped integrate the portal into the enchanted woodland. The Magic Logs remained at the base while the floating yellow stars continued to communicate its magical energy.
This became my favourite portal design of the three.
Portal Iteration 3
The third iteration took a much more architectural approach, using a carved stone doorway with a turquoise portal set inside it.
A stylised stone hamster head sits above the entrance as a small piece of environmental storytelling, subtly hinting towards Tammy and the quest ahead.
I particularly enjoyed both Iterations 2 and 3, and I even considered giving them separate functions within the game.
Iteration 3 could potentially serve as the entrance to the Mage’s Retreat, while Iteration 2 could act as the exit portal within the village.
However, Iteration 2 is by far my favourite design of the three, and I would also be very happy for it to become the sole portal design for both entering and leaving the Mage’s Retreat.
Example Dialogue
Because I had already written the quest narrative, I decided to take the project one step further and create examples of how the quest could actually appear in-game.
I created dialogue using an Old School RuneScape-inspired presentation and font styling.
This allowed me to bring the character of Paige and narrative together and think about how her personality would actually be communicated to the player.
Meeting the Brief
One of the things I enjoyed most about this project was how much it grew beyond the original requirements.
The challenge asked for:
Early concept art exploring a starting village, destination and character
Adaptation of artwork towards implemented assets
Clear art direction guidelines covering colour palette, lighting mood and character proportions
I wanted to demonstrate all of these things, but I also saw the challenge as an opportunity to explore other areas of Games Design that I am interested in.
This led me to create the full quest narrative, character biographies, environmental descriptions, additional NPCs, gameplay context and example dialogue.
Rather than creating a collection of disconnected drawings, I wanted everything to contribute towards one cohesive quest experience.The Art Challenge brief specifically asked for a strong and consistent visual identity inspired by RuneScape’s approach, including realistic forms and shape language, colourful textures, stylised shapes, clear lighting direction and character proportions.
Closing Note
Overall, I am really proud of how far this project developed.
What started as an art challenge entry became a complete little corner of Gielinor, with its own quest, characters, boss, village, creatures, portals and narrative.
I particularly enjoyed creating Paige and Tammy because they allowed me to lean into the weird, silly and slightly chaotic humour that I associate with RuneScape.
The idea of an elderly, senile witch believing that a gigantic hamster in a wizard hat is a terrifying dark wizard still makes me laugh.
I also really enjoyed designing the Mage’s Retreat because it allowed me to take elements that already exist within RuneScape’s magical world and reinterpret them into somewhere completely new.
As a Year 1 Games Design student, this challenge gave me the opportunity to push myself beyond creating individual pieces of artwork and start thinking more about how art, narrative, character design and environment design work together to create a game world.