At the beginning of this year, we played The Cave for the Double Fine Game Club, a game in which the player controls characters who are (low level spoiler alert) exploring themselves by playing out critical decisions in their lives inside a talking cave (perhaps a little like the tree on Dagobah from The Empire Strikes Back?).

We were joined by creator and renowned developer Ron Gilbert, who talked about how he had had the idea for The Cave floating around for many decades, but let the other designers and developers (left to right in the image are Lead Programmer Chad Dawson, Lead Designer JP LeBreton, and Art Director Andy Wood) from Double Fine bring their own creativity to the project.

At the time, I was inspired by the notion that perhaps their exploring of Ron's concept for The Cave and experiencing their own acts of creativity within it in some ways mirrored the in-game characters' journeys and sketched out this with the hopes of having something finished and printed to give to Ron when I met him at PAX Aus in July.

Unfortunately, this project got away from me and was put aside many times, costing me momentum. I had intended originally to make something more painterly, but after many shifts and compromises, I settled on what's here.

Mim was an invaluable help with this one, providing sketches of Chad, JP and Andy, as well as feedback and perspective on when to step back and change direction (the latter being hugely necessary).

A 1920x1080 version can be found here, and a GIF showing some of the iterations this piece went through can be found here.