Iwo Kmiecik
Avitium is a card-battler/turn based RPG developed between August 2024 and May 2025 in collaboration with Kisa Rodriguez and Megan Kennedy as a senior capstone project for the BFA in Game Arts at Pratt Institute. An earlier prototype for the game was made under the name Solanum in April-May 2025.
I was the art director of the project, responsible for curating the visual feel of the game through ideation and concept art, as well as creating 3D and 2D assets, animaitons, UI design and applying them into the game as the technical artist.
Avitium has three primary characters: King Kazimierz, Commander Nawojka, and the main character - Miłowit. The three have spent many years with each other, both due to their shared duties and personal ties. An important goal of the character designs was to reflect that - the characters wear similar style of clothing and have similar subdued color themes, with the exception of their respective accent colors. Each of the three is assigned a different primary color that reflects their personality and goals - Kazimierz is cold and selfish while profoundly sad, Nawojka is determined and ready to take action for the future, and Miłowit is quick to act and loyal.
The character designs also utilize a bird theme carried over from the previous verison of the game, Solanum. For Avitium, I revisited the theming and its significance, this time assigning the characters bird species native to Poland. Miłowit is a gull, Kazimierz a Magpie, and Nawojka an Osprey. The three have different types of antagonistic relationships that reflect the characters' behaviors towards each other. For example, Nawojka and Miłowit can be hostile towards each other in tense situations, but generally coexist. Kazimierz rarely engages in direct conflict, but manipulates others in cunning ways.
The world also features multiple non-playable characters of different class backgrounds and loyalties signified byt heir clothing and color schemes. The NPCs were generally assigned secondary or tertiary colors.
The primary environment of the game is the castle courtyard with a garden inspired by the royal gardens of multiple palaces in Warsaw. It was important to me that the castle and courtyard, especially at the start of the game, have an organized and opulent feel, contrasting the real situation of the kingdom.
The secondary environment is the knights’ barracks, where the main character and his fellow protectors of the kingdom spend their spare time. Here, it was important to me to showcase the difference in treatment between characters based on social standing - the main character and the general have large, single-person rooms, while the younger cadets all sleep in a large communal bedroom. All of that is put together by a large training room, which is the focal point of the building.
The buildings in the project were heavily inspired by the architecture of Gdańsk, Poland and its abundance of red brick, ornamental buildings.
The main challenge of creating the project's environment was keeping them interesting while reusing the same scene in the narrative, with the entirety of the story happening on the castle grounds. I achieved that through changes in lighting between the story's timestamps. Each beat has its own color light overlay, with the colors getting colder and darker toward the end of the game.
Since Avitium is a card-based game, a major point of development was creating a UI that would not only look good, but also feel good during gameplay. Working together with the UX designer (Megan), I came up with concepts for two separate battle UIs that would be used for card battling and tricktaking. The two had to be distinctly different while maintaining the same aesthetic feel as to not make the game disjointed.
Aesthetically, the UI pulls from Polish folk patterning, primarly seen in clothing. Usually the cloth patterning combines sharp and rounded shapes, as well as multiple colors, but to make the UI elements distinct, I separated the patterns into distinct shapes. Only the general UI uses combined patterning and colors.