The art of Golf Club: Wasteland

“Human life is mostly wiped out. Earth is now a golf course for the ultra-rich.” It’s a solid setup for a stark, haunting game of the world’s best way to ruin a good walk. Golf Club: Wasteland mixes satire with beauty to good effect, as Nikola Stepković, creative director at Demagog Studio, explains: “Our main task was to bring the wasteland to life in a way that showed the melancholy of our main character, the emptiness of the future world in which the game is set, and create a polygon to reflect our present social and cultural moment.

“At the same time, we wanted to be funny and draw out the humorous premise and make it apparent at all times. So it was important that world-building and the visual style remain light-hearted as much as possible.” A highly stylised approach was thus used to great effect, with every environmental asset reduced to its silhouette, and a colour palette remaining as limited as possible without quite being monochromatic. “This way we could iterate fast on the ideas and stay visually consistent throughout the game development,” Stepković says, “without fear that we will break the mood no matter what silly idea we come up with in the process.

“Other important aspects of the visual style were fog and pink neons scattered across the landscape. The fog helped us achieve the gloominess of the post-apocalyptic landscape. When combined with pink neons, the bluish fog created a weird contrast that was a perfect visual platform for the message we tried to send.”