MAIA'S DESIGNS
Cultist Simulator:
The Mariner Mod
120+ images (and counting) over the course of two years.
It’s fairly common for popular video games to have an avid modding community -- teams or individuals that will modify the base game’s features or add more of their own. This comes with a lot of coding, a lot of development, and often on the tail end a lot of visual modifications as well. Some mods are almost entirely cosmetic, character reskins or palette alterations are often very popular and well-recieved. The indie game Cultist Simulator has a small but dedicated modding community, and I’ve been commissioned a few times to supply the visuals for these projects.
The Mariner mod is probably the biggest mod in CS (Cultist Simulator) history so far, and isn’t even properly done yet! The team behind this project has been working on Mariner for about two years now, and are still developing and updating the content within. I’m very fortunate to have been a part of this undertaking, and it’s always exciting to see the art I’ve made nestled into a game’s codes.
CS has a pretty abstract, simple style with a strict color palette and lots of references to pull off of when developing my own way of recreating their in-game assets. It’s always black and white with an accent for weather assets, aspect elements are given a black border, esoterica is demarcated with floating, translucent shapes and sparkles. Obviously we played with and bent some of the base game’s rules to fit with certain concepts within Mariner, but all in all the style you see in-game is the style I was meant to emulate.
