tERRORbane
BitNine Studio — 2016–2022 | Publisher: WhisperGames | Made with Unity
tERRORbane is a comedic meta-adventure built around a simple premise: the Developer who made this game is incompetent, and it’s your job to document every mistake he made.
Bugs are not obstacles, they are the key mechanic.
As sole artist and Art Director at BitNine Studio, I was responsible for the complete visual identity of the game from first concept to ship: character design, environments, UI, animation, key art, marketing materials, and approximately half of the original soundtrack.
01 – ART DIRECTION
Style as statement
The visual language of tERRORbane is built on a deliberate tension: a coherent pixel art foundation that systematically breaks down as the player progresses.
The visual starting point is the RPGMaker aesthetic, a marker of scrappy, self-taught development used here as a conceptual statement: the Developer built this game his way, for the love of it. The game is also intended as a love letter to the 16-bit JRPG era (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI) executed with modern pixel art, dynamic lighting, particles, post-processing and built in Unity throughout.
This foundation is designed to build a false sense of predictability and then break without warning, as genre shifts happen for comic effect – a direct result of the Developer’s indecisiveness and lacklustre coding.
The JRPG aesthetic gives way to a rhythm game, a terminal interface, a bullet hell, a full card game, and many others… each register fully realized, and immediately readable as wrong in the best possible way.
02 – DESIGN
From sketch to pixel grid
Character and environment development moved fluidly between illustration and pixel art: sketching to nail proportions and personality, then validating and refining directly on the pixel grid.
The UI operates across three registers depending on narrative context: conventional retro, deliberately glitched, and genre-specific. The most distinct element is the Bug List — the player’s personal challenge to the Developer. Visually it resembles a real handwritten notepad, completely detached from the game’s pixel art language by design. In a world of digital errors, the player’s tool is a piece of paper.
03 – DIGITAL MARKETING
Two trailers, two approaches
Both trailers extend the game’s meta-logic into the marketing itself. For Gamescom 2021, knowing that pixel art gameplay footage alone wouldn’t cut through in a crowded showcase, we leaned into live action: the Developer appears on screen to announce the trailer is already over, then the PC catches fire.
The approach paid off: the trailer earned tERRORbane a nomination for Most Original Game at the Gamescom Awards 2021.
For the launch trailer, the brief was to make the meta-narrative and genre-blending playable in the trailer itself. The result was a mixed-media production: sock puppets, clay animation, hand-drawn sequences, motion
graphics, deliberately chaotic, designed to stand out in a Steam feed and turn curiosity into wishlists.
It also couldn’t resist a final wink at the realities of indie production: a joke about the budget it takes to make a trailer with real animation.
The game launched on April 1st. Of course it did.
04 – OUTPUT
What I Worked On
05 – RECEPTION
Awards & selections
“…DID YOU JUST SKIP THE INTRO?”
