Aethspawn Creature Concept Art

The Aethspawn Shambler is the primary enemy in Exodus: Rising. The Aethspawn are made up of a gloopy material called Aether combined with the manifestation of peoples fears.

The idea behind the shambler was that they where what and enemy race feared most about the opponents they where fighting. Designing the creatures at this point was blue sky thinking and open ended but my main inspiration was phobias.

A big inspiration behind a lot of the thumbnail ideas was the fear of insects and things that creep and crawl, giving the forms of the design a mangled and spindly approach.

These forms took the mangled idea further into the body horror territory.

I had refined the idea down to a sort of shambling body at this point and the idea of the Aether being a sort of gloopy congealed tar like substance that the creature had formed out of.

The idea behind this enemy was that it was a regular Shambler that had spent more time congealing and absorbing more and more nightmares, hence the bigger body that has grown around the original Shambler.

This was a design for another boss enemy that had latched onto the arachnophobia concept, sporting super spindly limbs and an egg sack.

The concept for this boss was the fear of dogs and other big meat eating animals of the world. I experimented with the idea of exaggerated horns and teeth as that tends to be the business end of vicious critters.