It is considered that the main source of inspiration for the Monument Valley series is paintings by Mauritz Escher. In fact, there are much more sources. Behind each level of the franchise’s games is a piece of art, a photo or even a music video.
David Fernandez Huerta, the game’s art director, told about what inspired the designers of Monument Valley 2 levels in the blog The Work behind The Work.
“Non-objective composition”, Olga Rozanova We have taken a lot from the works of other artists and from the history of art. What we did can be compared to an artistic interpretation of something. Change the content and make it your own.
Poster for the musical album Modern Vampires of the City by Vampire Weekend, Rostam Batmanglij This is a recording that I have at home. When working on the level, I did not look at the poster, but the image was somewhere in my subcortex. We all carry such things with us.
Poster of the commune of Saint-Raphael, located on the Cote d’Azur, Tom Morel De Tanguy Sometimes we steal such things from vacation, as I did when I visited Pompeii a couple of years ago.
This level was inspired by Kim Chi from RuPaul's Drag Race.
London National Theatre, Denys Lasdun We often also started from the posters of the Bauhaus and the architectural style of brutalism.
Stills from Nicki Minaj’s music video for the song Super Bass, directed by Sanaa Hamri One of our artists, Lauren Cason, loves Nicki Minaj clips very much.
Concept art for Walt Disney’s Peter Pan, Mary Blair This illustration of the adventures of Peter Pan is one of Lauren's favorite works and the most important source of her inspiration throughout her career.
Liquorice assorted This level was inspired by the candy color palette.
We want everyone in the team to be immersed in the artistic style of the game. Therefore, we print out a bunch of references and attach them to the boards so that then, when working on the level, we can carry them around the office with us (we do not have jobs assigned to employees).
When working on Monument Valley 2, we also printed out each level of the game. We started practicing this even when developing the first part. This gives a good idea of how the game looks in general.
Left: layout. Right: final level The process usually goes from layout to concept art and from sketches to the final version. The process is highly dependent on the artist. We try to combine different approaches, which means that everyone works a little differently.
We are always asked how these seemingly impossible levels work. Impossibility and optical illusions are the heart of Monument Valley. The secret is that three-dimensional objects are arranged in such a way that from the point of view of the camera the path looks possible. When a character passes through certain parts of the path, he actually teleports from one point to another.
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