Hi, my name is Francesco Dossena and I’m the Master of Alchemy’s concept artist and illustrator.
I’ve been working at DarkWave Games for almost 1 year (since its creation). It has been a completely new experience for me: I’m mainly a comics artist…but at DarkWave Games people want to create artistic videogames, so they hired me – Lucky them !

Speaking about Master of Alchemy (MoA), my graphic approach to it was very impulsive: it was a period in which I was already working with that kind of shapes and settings; moreover, the possibility to trasform a chimical/alchemic laboratory into a steampunk lab was really exciting.

To design alembics’ (/stills) shapes, I always started from real objects with a similar function (i.e. the blower is an hairdryer); graphically, to give them a steampunk look, I have replaced glass and plastic with steel and bronze (and I have added a lot of rust ).
The really difficult thing was that we had to use modular shapes: repeating these shapes in more alembics, we succeeded in saving a lot of the iPad/iPhone memory.

I used a similar approach also for characters…I started from traditional looks, to finish to more metropolitan evolutions (fortunately, in this case I didn’t have to use modular shapes).

By the way, I’m really proud of the Nova Persona character (an Alchemist Robot) – he was so liked that we created a comics about his born/creation and we will use it to introduce the reader to the Master of Alchemy’s background.

If you want to know more about me: http://doscomics.blogspot.com/ (even if it isn’t so updated … but a big change is coming).