[ DOME ] Building an RPG as an Art Practice

DOME is a medieval RPG in development by two friends from Osijek, Croatia, Dorian, an archaeologist, and Filip, an art restorer. We had a chat with them about the concept, the motivation, and why they're in no rush to finish it.

Since our conversation, they shared more about the game itself. DOME is an action-adventure set in the Balkans at the start of the 15th century, where the appearance of a mysterious star begins to alter the course of history and awaken a growing presence of demonic beings. You play a traveler inexplicably drawn toward the star, and following its path takes you gradually east, through different lands shaped by its appearance. Along the way you explore settlements and landscapes, talk to people, examine the world, find and combine items, and fight both human and supernatural enemies through combat that blends tactical decisions with real-time action. It's a mysterious journey where history gradually intertwines with the supernatural.

How did you two meet and decide to start working on this together?

D: We knew each other before, we both studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. When we finished, Filip was already doing some drawings, and he wanted to find someone to also start making ideas and drawing with him. He just came to me and said, "I have no money, but I have an idea, let's do it." And I told him, "let's do it."

Is this a full-time project for you?

F: No, no. It's a lot of improvisation, trying to combine a daily job with this project, which is quite big.

What do you both do outside of DOME?

Dorian: Filip works in restoration, I work in archaeology, a good mixture for the game, actually.

Filip: We work almost like one team. I work two weeks at a regular job, then two weeks free, so I try to do as much as possible on the game when I'm off. We schedule what needs to get done.

Dorian: After I finish at the archaeological museum, I come here and just work more.

Where did the idea for DOME actually come from?

Filip: It came very slowly. I'd been thinking about making a game for a long time, the story, the setting, ideas I wanted to express, almost like an artist would. It just took a long time to find the right framework to land those ideas in.

What I wanted was an old medieval world, castles, dragons, knights, swords, armor, archetypes with real weight behind them. But I also wanted it to carry a contemporary feeling. So the setting is the Middle Ages, but the way the characters think and feel is closer to today. We're trying to express how we feel about the world right now, just inside that medieval setting.

Why a game specifically, and not a painting or a piece of music?

Filip: I always wanted to make a game. From a young age, I knew. Whenever I was thinking about art or something, I was always thinking about how to translate it into a game. It's like the default for me. As a teenager I liked collecting pieces of concept art online, and I was always thinking about how to translate that into a video game.

Are you both gamers? What's the game you've put the most hours into?

Filip: Dark Souls, I think, would be the one.

Dorian: Path of Exile, or Civilization.

Were there specific inspirations behind DOME's world, a book, a game, a folk tale from your own country?

Dorian: A few things, actually. When we were making the first drawings, we'd sometimes just get in the car, drive out to nature, and draw by hand, then bring that into the digital work. We weren't trying to copy the Balkan geography exactly, but the thought, the view, the atmosphere of it mattered. We don't have palm trees, more oak trees, the kind around our town, and that's what actually inspired us.

Films played a big part too, directors like Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, The Seventh Seal specifically. And books, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky.

Is there something specific from Dostoevsky in the work?

Filip: The main character will be a little bit like a Dostoevsky character, someone who struggles with deep thoughts, deep moral issues, spiritual matters. We won't put that in your face, we'll do it subtly, the way Dostoevsky did. I think of him as a struggling young man who isn't happy with anything, who questions everything.

The main character still doesn't have a name. Why is that?

Filip: We only have a drawing of him so far. Sometimes you have a name for something and create out of that, but in this case, I think we'll build the main character first, and hopefully the name will come on its own.

Dorian: We're working out his characteristics first.

What does the name DOME actually mean?

Filip: A friend of ours suggested it, we were talking about the game with him, he's also an artist, and he said, "wait, Dome, it means home in Croatian."

Dorian: The character's own existential problems mix with that idea of home, trying to connect with the world, with nature. That's part of the contemporary side too. That pull toward nature, toward finding some calm, is something a lot of people struggle with today, buried in information the way we are.

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Could you describe DOME in one sentence?

Filip: It sounds too big and too great, but essentially, it's a quest for finding meaning.

Can you say more about that, without giving too much away?

Filip: We're at the point where we don't want to tell too much in advance...

Dorian: You'll get the lore through fragments, not "you're born here, now go from place A to B and kill the dragon." You piece the story together yourself from scenes, but it's never a finished thing, there's no final conclusion handed to you. It's like reading a book, the second time through you notice different things, the third time something else comes up. There's a lot of archetypes in it, a lot of symbols. We'd rather a player walk away with their own thoughts about what they experienced than follow a checklist.

The main character starts out just walking, with a feeling of being lost, and as you travel, the story reveals itself a little at a time.

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Does that feeling of being lost resonate with you personally, or is it more something you see in the world?

Dorian: More in the way it's present in the world than in ourselves, though it has to be a mix of both.

Filip: It's also a little bit personal, of course. Every day is kind of a struggle, and I think that struggle carries a bit of existentialism in it too.

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How important is it to you to represent Balkan and Slavic culture specifically in this project?

Filip: I have almost a philosophical view of that question. It's not that we want to force Slavic or Balkan culture into it, but we don't want to forget it either. We don't want it to become some universal mythology, generic monsters, generic nature. So we're nurturing our own roots, letting the fact that we're from Croatia, from the Balkans, come through naturally in the creative process.

Dorian: Since we're working in restoration and archaeology, we pull references from the cultures around us, but more as a feeling than as exact history. We won't chase the exact year something happened, it's more about capturing the atmosphere of the time.

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The art has a gloomy, dark quality to it. Does that reflect on Balkan culture itself, since this is also an RPG you're playing through as that character?

Dorian: I don't think it works that simply, like it's dark the way Diablo is dark. Some parts will be dark, but some parts will just be beautiful. Some of it is also because it's black and white.

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Why black and white?

Filip: It's more of a technical issue, honestly. We were looking at a lot of graphic art and paintings that were often black and white, and it all started from the drawing, so we just didn't need to paint, we start from the drawing and finish with the drawing. It also lets us go wild with the drawing, we can copy and paste parts of environments without worrying about visible edges, and just be more expressive. If we had color, we'd have to be more careful.

Dorian: We looked a lot at the etchings of Gustave Doré, and Rembrandt too, the old masters.

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Is the pixel art also a technical choice in the same way?

Filip: We knew what we wanted to represent, and on the other side there were technical constraints, and pixel art with black and white is where those two things met in the middle.

Dorian: There's an idea behind it too. We're not huge fans of triple-A games, we grew up on games from the 90s, and those had good bones, good stories, things that sometimes get lost in AAA games today, where you can pick up a hundred items and do nothing meaningful with any of them. Working in pixel is a restriction, but that restriction gives you freedom too. Give us a program with endless options and we'd probably just get confused and take twice as long. It's good to restrict yourself, work small, and make the most of it.

How would you describe your actual workflow, going from concept to production?

Filip: I think we have a specific, unusual way of working, probably because of our background in other arts, painting and so on. We don't take a very systematic approach, a lot of developers would say you have to plan everything out clearly, but we enjoy working the way we do, everything comes from drawing. Even the story comes from drawing, in many cases, from the feeling of the drawing itself.

Dorian: Many times we do something, test it, and that opens our eyes to the next thing. It's like a spiral, drawing, story, gameplay, drawing, story, gameplay, always going in circles. Hopefully that builds a really unique experience. Some days we'll work two hours, other days ten, it's like visual art that way, sometimes you have a lot of ideas, sometimes you don't, but you still have to work.

Is there a target or goal in mind for when the project will actually be finished?

Filip: That's the hardest question, honestly. I don't know. But I will not give up.

Dorian: We'll get to 99% and then stop.

Filip: I can't imagine what would have to happen for that not to be true. It'll come eventually, just not on any timeline we're willing to commit to anymore.

What's the hardest, or least enjoyable, part of this process for each of you?

Dorian: Marketing, probably, for me.

Filip: For me, it's when I have to do something in the engine, I'm not very experienced there, so it can be frustrating, especially learning something quickly that I've never done before. Combining Blender for modeling, a tablet for drawing, and Unity for the engine, all at once, that can be a bit of a headache.

Dorian: That's the beauty of two people.

What would you like people to take away from DOME, and how can people support you?

Filip: I hope people can expect something old school from DOME, but not nostalgia. We're not going back, we're doing something new, the feeling, the spirit, the ideas, they all come from old movies, mostly old games, old books.

Dorian: For support, right now we're only on social media, but we'll have things on Steam soon.

If someone likes a certain game already, what would tell them they're going to enjoy DOME?

Dorian: Maybe Baldur's Gate, or Planescape: Torment.

Filip: There's also an old game I played recently that blew my mind, Quest for Glory. People kept commenting that DOME looked like it, so I looked it up, played the first one, and it blew my mind too. Some of that old-school feeling, partially Dark Souls too.

Dorian: Some older adventure games.

Filip: Yeah, maybe old Zelda, A Link to the Past.

What's your take on AI in the creative industry and in game development?

Dorian: For the creative industry, I don't care much for it. For coding, sure, it's a huge resource, it would be silly not to use it there. But for the creative part, I'm not so sure, I don't think it's doing good stuff at this point.

Do you watch anime or read manga? What are your favorites?

Dorian: I like Claymore, or Berserk. And Ghost in the Shell, for me that's the top of the top.

Filip: Pretty much the same. I love basically every anime, Studio Ghibli too, but Berserk is probably my favorite. I read the manga as well, it was translated into Croatian, and it blew my mind.

Are there any conscious or unconscious influences from Berserk in DOME?

Filip: I think there is, maybe not consciously, but unconsciously, 100%. I love how the story develops in Berserk, everything connects somehow, it just keeps going.

Anything you wanted to say that we haven't covered?

Dorian: We're just happy that you see our work, it makes us proud to keep going.

Filip: When you're working with just passion and nothing else, times get hard, especially when you don't have time to give the game what it needs. But when someone actually sees the work you're doing, it gives you faith back. As we said, we will never give up.