Set in a dark fantasy world inspired by Norse and Celtic mythology, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, released in 2017 was praised as a work of art and applauded for the way it tackled psychosis and mental health through it's titular character, Senua.

Now, with the game grabbing new audiences and plaudits with its enhanced release on Xbox Series X, S and PC I was responsible for giving the official website an accompanying visual makeover from the ground up.

Solution

I began by immersing myself in the game to better understand its visual style so that I could creatively align the new website design. I settled on quite a dark palette with Norse overtones. I also opted to utilise WebGL for some of the visual effects and UI and designed and prototyped these out for the developer on the project.

The character of Senua is so iconic and the game itself has always been a best in class example of its use of facial motion capture. I wanted to align to this and create immersion in the website experience by using depth maps to bring the original 2D art to life.

The luminance values in the depth map allowed the animation of the 2D image to give the impression it existed in 3D space. In build this was then 3D tracked to the movement of the users cursor giving the impression that Senua’s face was following them.

I had so much fun reimagining the new Hellblade website and it was a pleasure to bring its official website on a par with what is a visually stunning and thought provoking game.