Salt & Steel: Design Philosophy

Document type: Product Vision — Foundational
Status: Canonical
Last updated: 2026-04
See also: Design Pillars | Creative Identity | GURPS Framework | Combat Systems | Voyage System

Overview

This document is not a list of features. It is an account of why — why we are making this game this way, why the pirate genre and the ARPG genre belong together, why GURPS is the right mechanical engine, why the sea must be a living world and not a backdrop, why complexity is a promise rather than a problem. Design documents that only describe what will be built are incomplete. This one documents the reasoning that will guide decisions not yet made, for situations not yet encountered, by team members not yet hired.

Path of Exile's design philosophy, reconstructed from a decade of GGG public statements, reveals a studio that made decisions at year one that were still being honored — and still coherent — at year ten. That longevity of vision is not an accident. It comes from having thought through why deeply enough that what follows naturally. That is what this document attempts for Salt & Steel.

Philosophy 1: Why Pirates? Why Now?

The Genre Marriage That Should Always Have Existed

The pirate genre and the action RPG genre are natural complements in ways that have never been fully exploited. Consider what both genres demand of their best examples:

The best pirate stories are about becoming. Not arriving fully-formed as a hero, but building toward something — a reputation, a crew, a legend. They are about the accumulation of resources and relationships in a hostile environment, the management of risk and reward, the navigation of moral ambiguity, and the expression of identity through action under pressure. They reward mastery of complex systems (navigation, trade, combat, politics). They place the protagonist in a world that does not stop moving while they figure things out.

The best ARPGs are about exactly the same things. Character build accumulation. Economy navigation. Risk/reward in dangerous content. Mastery of complex interlocking systems. A world that continues generating challenges. The genres are not similar — they are isomorphic. The pirate fantasy and the ARPG loop describe the same emotional and mechanical arc at different levels of abstraction.

The question is not "can pirates work in an ARPG?" The question is "why hasn't anyone built this properly?" The answer is that it requires committing fully to both genres simultaneously rather than using one as a theme coat of paint over the other. Sea of Thieves is a pirate game with light RPG elements. Risen 2 is an RPG with pirate window-dressing. Neither committed to making the pirate fantasy and the RPG depth reinforce each other at every design decision.

Salt & Steel commits fully. The pirate fantasy is the ARPG. The ARPG is the pirate fantasy. They are not two separate systems politely coexisting — they are one integrated experience.

The Power of Underexplored Fantasy

Pirate fantasy is one of the most beloved themes in Western (and global) popular culture — and one of the most underserved in the games medium, especially in the RPG space. The audience exists. The desire exists. The reference material (Black Sails, One Piece, Treasure Island, The Princess and the Pirate, Master and Commander, countless more) is rich and varied. The visual and audio vocabulary is established and beloved.

Building in an underexplored space is not safer than building in a crowded space — but it is more definitionally differentiated. Salt & Steel does not have to explain why it is better than the other pirate ARPG. There is no other pirate ARPG.

Philosophy 2: Meaningful Choice — GURPS as Identity Engine

The Problem With Stats

Most ARPGs reduce character identity to a set of statistics. Intelligence governs spell power. Dexterity governs attack speed. Strength governs weapon requirements. These statistics are useful mechanical scaffolding but they describe capabilities, not people. A character with 40 Intelligence and 10 Strength is not a person. They are an optimization configuration.

GURPS solves this by building character definition from a different foundation: who you are determines what you can do, not just how well you can do it. A character with the Advantage "Intuition" does not just get a probability bonus to certain skill checks. They are someone who trusts hunches — and the game responds to that identity by presenting them with moments where the hunch matters. A character with the Disadvantage "Overconfidence" is not just a character who takes a penalty to certain retreat decisions. They are someone who genuinely believes they can handle whatever comes next — and that belief shapes their relationship with the world.

This shift — from capability definition to identity definition — is the philosophical heart of Salt & Steel's character system. The goal is not for players to optimize a build. The goal is for players to play a person.

Disadvantages Are Not Punishments

This requires restating clearly enough to become a design commandment: Disadvantages are not punishments. They are character.

Every design decision in the GURPS implementation must honor this. A Disadvantage that makes the game less fun without making it more interesting has been designed incorrectly. Disadvantages should create:

Moments of narrative comedy or drama
Alternative approaches to situations that other characters cannot access
Relationships with NPCs that would be unavailable to a "clean" character
A sense that the character has weight — they are not infinitely flexible

If a player takes the Disadvantage "Stubbornness" and the only mechanical consequence is that they occasionally fail social persuasion checks, the design has failed. "Stubbornness" should generate moments of stubbornness — situations where the character's refusal to back down creates story, whether that story is triumphant or disastrous.

This philosophy demands significant design investment: every Disadvantage needs active game responses, not just passive probability modifications.

The Replayability Dividend

A character system built on identity rather than optimization produces a specific kind of replayability that statistics-based systems cannot. When you replay an optimization-based ARPG, you are choosing a different set of numbers to maximize. When you replay an identity-based ARPG, you are choosing to be a different person — to experience the same world through a fundamentally different lens.

A captain with "Empathy" and "Code of Honor" navigates the world's political landscape differently than one with "Greed" and "Overconfidence." They encounter different NPCs, access different questlines, experience different crew dynamics, and make different decisions in moments of ambiguity. These are not slight variations — they are different playthroughs of the same game that tell meaningfully different stories.

This is the deepest form of replayability an ARPG can deliver. It does not require new content to feel new. It requires a world rich enough to respond to who you are.

Philosophy 3: Combat — Reactive, Tactical, and Consequential

The Tension Between Weight and Speed

Combat design in ARPGs exists on a spectrum between two poles. At one pole: the fast, kinetic, screen-clearing combat of Diablo and its descendants, where power is expressed through overwhelming volume and speed. At the other: the deliberate, consequence-heavy combat of the Souls games and their descendants, where every exchange is a risk calculation and death is meaningful.

Salt & Steel does not live at either pole. Both are legitimate design philosophies, but neither fits the Captain's Fantasy precisely. The Captain's Fantasy demands combat that feels dangerous — individual actions matter, wounds accumulate, positioning is meaningful — without demanding the kind of patient, methodical engagement that would slow the game to a pace incompatible with the ARPG's core loop.

The resolution: weighted and reactive, not zoom-zoom and not punishingly slow. Combat should feel like swordplay — the rhythm of attack and defense, the reading of enemy intention, the satisfaction of a successful parry followed by a counterattack — without requiring Dark Souls-level muscle memory or forcing the player to face a single enemy for five minutes.

The GURPS Active Defense System as Tactical Heart

GURPS's active defense mechanic — Dodge, Parry, Block as reactive player choices — is the primary mechanism for achieving this balance. Unlike most ARPGs where defense is passive (armor reduces damage by X%), GURPS defense is chosen in response to incoming attacks. This means combat has a rhythm of exchange: enemy attacks, player chooses defense, defense resolves, player counterattacks.

This rhythm creates meaningful moment-to-moment decisions without slowing combat to a crawl. The decision ("do I dodge this or parry?") takes a fraction of a second but is a real decision based on the player's read of the situation: their current weapon, their enemy's attack type, their remaining fatigue, whether a nearby enemy would benefit from their repositioning during a dodge. These decisions accumulate into mastery — experienced players read combat situations in ways that newer players cannot, not because of reflexes, but because of knowledge.

Wounds Have Consequences

GURPS's hit location and injury system introduces a moral of pain and consequence into combat that most ARPGs avoid. In most ARPGs, HP is an abstract resource. In Salt & Steel, injuries affect the location that was hit:

An arm hit may reduce weapon-skill or cause weapon-drop.
A leg hit reduces movement speed and stability.
A head hit risks consciousness.
A torso hit affects breathing and stamina recovery.

These consequences are not constant penalties — they are situation-specific impairments that change what the player can do and how they must adapt. A fight where the player loses mobility must be resolved differently than one where they remain fully mobile. This is emergent tactical complexity from a single mechanical decision.

The consequences also make healing meaningful. Healing potions in most ARPGs restore an abstract resource. In Salt & Steel, healing addresses specific injuries with specific mechanical benefits. A poultice applied to a leg wound restores mobility. A physician on the crew provides sustained post-combat recovery that field medicine cannot. The consequence-consequence chain — injury creates impairment, impairment changes combat options, healing addresses impairment — creates a richer, more narratively textured combat experience.

Naval Combat: A Different Game in the Same World

Naval combat operates by different principles than on-foot combat, and this distinction must be honored by the design. Naval combat is strategic where on-foot combat is tactical. It unfolds over longer time horizons, involves resources (ammunition, crew morale, hull integrity) that cannot be restored quickly, and requires thinking about the shape of the engagement — positioning, angle of approach, wind advantage — before the first cannon fires.

The design philosophy for naval combat draws from historical naval warfare rather than from ARPG combat conventions: Nelson's "the simple act of getting into the enemy's line" as a strategic goal, the decision between long-range harassing fire and closing for boarding, the recognition that a ship's greatest asset is often its crew and a half-manned ship is as dangerous as a half-armed one.

Naval combat is not faster than on-foot combat and should not try to be. It is different in kind. Players who want fast, reactive moment-to-moment exchanges go to on-foot combat. Players who want strategic, large-consequence decisions go to naval combat. Both are equally valid and equally rewarding expressions of captaincy.

Philosophy 4: Two Worlds — Land and Sea as Complements

The Integration Imperative

Salt & Steel has two primary gameplay environments: the sea and the land. The philosophical commitment: these must be complements, not competitors. Neither is the "real" game that the other interrupts. The sea is not a transition between island dungeon instances. The land is not a diversion from the sailing experience. They are two equal, necessary, and mutually enriching halves of the full captain experience.

This integration imperative has design consequences at every level:

Narrative integration: Storylines should weave between land and sea naturally. A questline that begins with a naval encounter (tracking a merchant convoy) should develop through on-land investigation (searching the port from which it departed) and resolve with another naval encounter (confronting the true orchestrator's warship). Neither environment is a loading screen for the other; both are arenas where the story lives.

Skill integration: Skills acquired in one environment should have value in the other. Navigation skill (sea) reveals hidden coves and difficult approaches when viewed from shore. Swordsmanship (land) is expressed in the boarding action phase of naval combat. Intimidation (land social skill) has a naval equivalent in the reputation system that affects whether enemy ships flee or fight. No skill should feel "wasted" in either environment.

Mechanical integration: The GURPS character system is the unifying layer. Whether fighting on foot or commanding a naval battle, the same character with the same Advantages, Disadvantages, and Skills is in charge. A character with "Tactical Genius" benefits in both environments. A character with "Overconfidence" creates risk in both. The character is not split between "land mode" and "sea mode" — they are always themselves, in a new arena.

The Philosophy of "Third Spaces"

Beyond pure on-foot environments (dungeons, settlements, jungles) and pure naval environments (open sea, naval combat), Salt & Steel features "third spaces" that blend the two:

Coastal zones: Shore-accessible regions where the ship can anchor while the captain explores on foot, but where naval events (weather, creature sightings, faction ships) continue to occur and must be managed by crew.
River deltas and inland waterways: Shallow-draft navigation that combines naval movement with close-quarters terrain navigation impossible in open sea.
Port districts: Hubs where naval logistics (ship repair, crew recruitment, cargo management) and land-based activities (market trading, information gathering, questlines) overlap in the same space.
Shallow sea combat: Encounters in shoal water where ship maneuverability is constrained, forcing unusual naval tactics alongside potential on-foot combat on exposed reefs or sandbars.

These third spaces prevent the two-world structure from feeling like two separate games. They are the connective tissue that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Philosophy 5: Complexity vs. Accessibility — The PoE Lesson

What PoE Proved and What It Warned

Path of Exile demonstrated that a highly complex ARPG could succeed commercially and sustain a large, passionate community over more than a decade. The complexity was a feature, not a design failure — it created mastery culture, community knowledge-sharing ecosystems, and the kind of deep engagement that turns players into advocates. Salt & Steel takes the lesson seriously: complexity is identity, and we will not apologize for it.

But PoE also demonstrated the cost of getting onboarding wrong. Years of player data showed high churn in the first hours of play. The passive tree — shown in its full overwhelming state from the first moment — sent new players a message: this is not for you. Many believed it. GGG's decade-long struggle with new player retention is the cautionary half of the PoE lesson.

The lesson is not "make it simpler." The lesson is: complexity is the reward, and the path to the reward must be navigable.

Onboarding as Revelation, Not Wall

Salt & Steel's onboarding philosophy: players should encounter the game's depth gradually, with each new layer of complexity revealed at a moment when they are ready for it and when it enriches an experience they are already enjoying.

In practice, this means:

The first hour is accessible. Character creation uses guided archetypes. Combat introduces GURPS active defenses one at a time. The sea is encountered safely, in familiar waters.
The second hour is intriguing. The captain's first real ship, the first crew member hired, the first reputation decision. The layers begin to reveal themselves.
The first week is deep. GURPS's full Advantage/Disadvantage implications emerge. Naval combat introduces wind mechanics. Faction relationships begin to matter. The player has context now; the complexity is welcome.
The first month is staggering. The full scope of the world, the interaction of systems, the endgame Nautical Chart, the Voyage competitive layer. This is where Salt & Steel's full depth lives. Players who reach this point understand what they are playing.

This is not a tutorial system. It is a pacing philosophy for world and systems design. Complexity should not be hidden — it should be introduced at the right moment, when the player has the experience to appreciate it.

The Distinction Between Complexity and Obscurity

Complexity is a virtue. Obscurity is a failure. This distinction matters:

Complexity: The system has many interactions and demands real understanding to master. Good.
Obscurity: The system's behavior cannot be predicted from available information; mastery requires outside resources because the game does not tell you what you need to know. Bad.

Salt & Steel's systems should be legible — their rules should be understandable from observation and in-game documentation. But they should have depth that takes time to fully understand. The difference between a beginning player and a veteran should be knowledge, not access to information the game withheld. Every mechanical interaction should be discoverable through engaged play. Third-party wikis and guides should enrich the experience, not be prerequisites for it.

Committing to the Expert Audience

We will design Salt & Steel for the player who will play it for five hundred hours. That player will encounter complexity that is built for their level of engagement. We will not strip the endgame of its difficulty to make it accessible to players who have been playing for twenty hours.

This is not elitism. It is an honest acknowledgment that the deep ARPG experience we want to create can only be created for an audience willing to invest the time to appreciate it. We want that audience to be as large as possible — hence the onboarding investment — but we will not compromise the experience for the dedicated player in service of the casual visitor.

The casual visitor who stays six hours and leaves is a disappointing outcome, but it is not the failure mode that breaks the game. The dedicated player who reaches the endgame and finds it hollow — that is the failure mode that kills Salt & Steel.

Philosophy 6: Narrative in an ARPG — The Pirate Genre's Gift

Why Story Matters Here (When It Often Doesn't)

Many ARPGs have stories. Few have stories that meaningfully enhance the experience rather than interrupting it. The ARPG loop — clear area, collect loot, improve build, clear harder area — is self-contained and deeply satisfying independent of narrative. Narrative in ARPGs often fights the loop rather than enhancing it: lengthy cutscenes break momentum, dialogue trees interrupt flow, storylines that require attention are resented by players who want to keep farming.

The pirate genre solves this problem structurally. The pirate narrative and the ARPG loop are not in tension — they are the same thing. The pirate story is about the accumulation of resources, the navigation of hostile factions, the building of a crew and reputation, and the pursuit of ever-greater prizes in increasingly dangerous waters. This is the ARPG loop. Story and game are not two separate things awkwardly bolted together. They describe the same experience.

Narrative Delivered Through Systems, Not Cutscenes

Salt & Steel's narrative philosophy: the world's story should emerge from systems, not be delivered by cutscenes.

Reputation as story: Your relationship with factions, your standing with crew members, your history of choices — these are the narrative. The story of your captain is the record of your decisions and their consequences.
The world's lore as discovery: History, mythology, and world-building are delivered through journals found in ruins, dialogue from encountered NPCs, inscriptions on artifacts, and the environmental design of locations. Players who want to engage with the world's story can immerse themselves; players who want to skip it can do so without losing mechanical progress.
Crew as narrative cast: The procedurally-generated crew provides the most personal narrative layer — relationships that develop over time, characters who grow or fail or die, interpersonal dynamics that create emergent drama. These are stories the design team did not write, generated by systems the design team built.

The Pirate Genre's Natural Storytelling Advantages

The pirate setting provides specific narrative affordances that most ARPG settings lack:

Moral ambiguity built in: The pirate is simultaneously outlaw and liberator, robber and legend, villain and hero depending on who is telling the story. Salt & Steel doesn't need to manufacture moral complexity — it is the genre's native territory. Every decision your captain makes exists in this moral gray zone, which makes those decisions feel genuinely weighted.

Discovery as plot: The act of exploration — finding a new island, charting an unmapped sea, discovering a hidden civilization — is both a gameplay activity and a narrative event. In most ARPGs, exploration is a means to find content. In Salt & Steel, exploration is the story.

The crew as ensemble: The pirate tradition has always been an ensemble story — the captain matters, but so does the crew. The cook, the navigator, the first mate, the suspicious stranger who joined in the last port — these characters have narrative weight in pirate fiction in a way that the followers of a lone hero do not. Salt & Steel's crew system honors this tradition, creating an ensemble cast from procedural generation.

Philosophy 7: Visual Philosophy — Josh Kirby's Fantastical Realism

The Art Direction Problem

Every game's art direction solves a specific problem: how do we make the world look? The wrong answers are the ones that have no distinctive answer — that look like "a fantasy game" or "a pirate game" rather than this specific game's interpretation of those things.

Salt & Steel's visual direction solves the art direction problem by committing fully to a specific, identifiable artistic sensibility: the fantastical realism of Josh Kirby. Kirby (1928–2001) was one of the most inventive cover artists of 20th-century science fiction and fantasy — his work for Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels is perhaps his most celebrated, but his output across science fiction, horror, and adventure was vast. His style is distinctive enough to be a valid answer to "what does Salt & Steel look like?"

What Kirby's Style Means for Game Art

Kirby's visual language has specific characteristics that translate directly to game art direction:

Exaggeration with internal logic: Kirby's figures are not realistic proportions, but they are consistent — within his worlds, the distortions are the rules. A squat, barrel-chested sailor with enormous hands and weathered creases in his face is not a character who looks wrong. He looks perfectly right for the world he inhabits. Game characters should be similarly exaggerated: the brawler's shoulders should be broader than anatomy allows, the mystic's fingers should be longer than natural, the navigator's eyes should be slightly too sharp and aware. These exaggerations are world-building.

Textured, lived-in surfaces: Kirby painted surfaces with density — wood grain that told stories, fabric worn to specific places, metal that had been repaired and repaired again. Salt & Steel's art pipeline should pursue this texture density. Ships should look like they have been to sea; characters should look like they have been in fights; ruins should look like they have been ruins for a long time and remember it.

Saturation and contrast: Kirby's palette was never muddy. His worlds are vivid — rich blues, sharp greens, warm ambers, blazing reds. This is not cartoonishness; it is a deliberate enhancement of reality's best moments. Salt & Steel is not a brown and grey world like PoE. It is a world of tropical sunsets, phosphorescent seas, crimson storm skies, and treasure that catches the light in ways that make your pulse quicken.

Creatures with personality: Kirby's monsters were never just threats — they were beings. They had expressions, histories suggested by their physiognomy, relationships with their environments. Salt & Steel's sea creatures should achieve this. A giant squid should have a face with intelligence behind the eyes. A sea serpent should move with the weight of something that has lived longer than empires. Even minor enemies should have the quality of things that exist for reasons beyond providing combat.

The grotesque and the beautiful coexisting: Kirby's art held both at once without apology. Beautiful women with impossibly long necks stood next to bulbous, cheerful monsters. Horrifying scenes had comic elements; comic scenes had moments of genuine dread. Salt & Steel should never be only one thing. A terrifying sea creature encounter should have something beautiful in it. A lovely tropical vista should have something subtly wrong.

Application to UI and Systems Presentation

The Josh Kirby visual philosophy extends beyond character and world art into UI design:

The Nautical Chart (endgame progression map) should look like an actual hand-drawn chart with artistic flourishes, sea-creature illustrations in unexplored regions, and ink-blot texture.
Skill gems and items should have illustrated card-style presentation with Kirby-esque miniature artwork.
The character creation interface should feel like filling out a ship's ledger or captain's log, not navigating a stat allocation screen.
Status conditions should be expressed visually through character animation and design, not just iconography — a bleeding character looks like they're bleeding.

Philosophy 8: The Living World — Emergent Gameplay Through Systems

The Failure of Scripted Living Worlds

Many games claim to offer living worlds. Most deliver scripted events that create the appearance of life without the systemic depth that generates genuine emergence. A scheduled market day is not a living economy. A patrol route is not a living faction. Periodic weather events are not a living climate. These are approximations of life, and players recognize the approximation.

Salt & Steel's living world commitment goes further: the systems that generate apparent life in the world must be genuine simulations, not scripts. Weather is simulated, not scheduled. Faction conflict is resolved through simulation logic based on faction resources and player influence, not scripted geopolitical events. Creature behavior emerges from behavioral models, not patrol waypoints.

This requires more engineering investment upfront and ongoing. It is worth the investment because the experiences it generates cannot be replicated by scripted systems. Two players sailing through the same sea region on the same evening should have different experiences because the world's state at that moment is genuinely dynamic — not because each player received a different scripted event from a pool.

Emergent Gameplay as Content Generation

The most valuable property of a genuinely living world is that it generates content that was never designed. Designers cannot plan for the ship caught between two factions warring in the same sea region during a hurricane. The simulation generates it. The player survives it, or does not. Either way, they remember it.

These unplanned experiences are the ones players share. They are the stories that travel through social circles and gaming communities and bring new players in. They cannot be manufactured by a marketing team. They can only be built by building a world that generates them.

The living world philosophy is therefore not just a design philosophy. It is a content strategy: invest in simulation depth, and the world generates stories on your behalf indefinitely.

Weather as Story Engine

Weather deserves specific treatment because it is the most frequent source of emergent gameplay in the maritime context:

A sudden fog bank during a naval chase inverts the power dynamic between hunter and prey.
A storm that catches a captain between ports forces improvisation — seek shelter, or push through?
Calm weather in a region known for storms makes the captain paranoid — what is the calm concealing?
A beautiful evening with bioluminescent water and clear stars is a moment of peace that makes the next storm more terrifying by contrast.

Weather is not just a hazard system. It is a pacing system, a tension system, and an atmosphere system simultaneously. The investment in making weather feel genuinely real — felt through ship movement, crew behavior, visual and audio design — is an investment in every minute of open-sea play.

Design Philosophy Failures We Acknowledge

Good design philosophy documentation is honest about the known failure modes of its own philosophy.

The complexity barrier is real and will cost us players. No matter how good our onboarding, some portion of potential players will encounter GURPS point-buy character creation and leave. Some will encounter the dual-layer learning curve and not stay to discover the depth. We accept this. We do not design for those players; we design for the players who will stay and make Salt & Steel their game.

The two-combat-system bet is expensive. Building two deep, standalone combat systems is significantly more expensive than building one. If naval combat fails to reach the quality bar, the whole product suffers. This risk is accepted and must be staffed accordingly.

The Living Sea simulation will have edge cases. Procedural simulation systems generate unexpected states. Some of these states will be entertaining; some will be broken. We must have robust detection and response systems for broken states while accepting that occasional surprising behavior is not a failure — it is a feature.

Ethical F2P will be financially tested. There will be moments when the revenue pressure to compromise the ethical F2P model is significant. These moments will require the philosophy to be stronger than the business pressure. This document exists in part to be referenced in those moments: this is who we said we were, before the pressure arrived.

GURPS Disadvantages will sometimes frustrate players. A player who took "Claustrophobia" may encounter content where that Disadvantage makes them feel stuck. The design must ensure that Disadvantages never create hard dead ends — there is always a route through. But frustration moments will occur. They must be treated as design feedback, not player failure.

The North Star

When any design decision is uncertain, this question cuts through:

Would a captain who loves the sea, respects danger, and lives for the horizon want to do this?

Not "would a player want to do this" — players want many things, some of them in conflict with a good game. Not "would this sell more cosmetics" — that is a downstream concern. Not "would this please the largest number of people" — we are not designing for the largest number.

We are designing for the captain who feels the pull of the unknown sea, who wants a crew they know by name, who respects an opponent who fights well, who loves a world that is alive and dangerous and beautiful. That captain is who we are making Salt & Steel for.

Every person on this team should be able to ask that question and answer it honestly before making a significant design decision. The answer should feel obvious. When it does not feel obvious, the question has not been asked sincerely enough yet.

See also:
Design Pillars — the structural commitments that implement this philosophy
Creative Identity — how this philosophy expresses aesthetically and emotionally
Combat Systems — applying the combat philosophy in detail
GURPS Framework — applying the character philosophy in detail
Visual Direction — applying the Josh Kirby philosophy in art production