Pink Cow Dung and Renaissance Paintings: Inside The Immortal John Triptych
Developer Joe Richardson explains how an unsolved door problem in 2022 eventually led to one of the stranger inventory items in his adventure game trilogy. The story involves museum browsing, a Dutch painting from the 1820s, and a bucket of pink dung.
A Door Problem That Got Out of Hand
Most game design origin stories start with a big vision. This one starts with too many doors.
In summer 2022, developer Joe Richardson was building a house interior for Death of the Reprobate, one of three titles that make up The Immortal John Triptych. As he explained in a piece published July 31 on Xbox Wire, the game is constructed entirely from chopped-up Renaissance paintings, which sounds like an elegant creative constraint until you realize it means you cannot simply delete architectural features that cause layout headaches.
“I’ve ended up with more doors than I anticipated,” Richardson wrote. The fix sounds simple enough: find a matching piece of blank wall. Except large stretches of empty wall were not, as it turns out, a favorite subject among Renaissance painters. Richardson also wanted to avoid corridor scenes that cause backtracking, and loops that confuse navigation. He needed a dead end, and he needed one that fit the visual language of the rest of the game.
He had a folder of on-brand garden and courtyard paintings labeled “village bits,” but could not stitch them together cleanly. Those paintings were, perhaps inevitably, also full of doors. He moved on.
The Dutch Painting That Changed Everything
About six months later, Richardson was browsing museum catalogues again when he found what he described as “this beauty”: Andreas Schelfhout’s Binnenplaatsje, painted between 1820 and 1830. The discovery set off what Richardson calls “an unexpected chain of reactions” that would eventually connect all three games in the trilogy and produce one of its stranger inventory items.
The specifics of exactly how a 19th-century Dutch courtyard painting leads to a bucket of pink cow dung are laid out in full in Richardson’s Xbox Wire post, which he frames as a window into his broader design process for the trilogy. The piece is tagged under ID@Xbox, the program Microsoft uses to support independent developers, and runs about four minutes.
What comes through clearly even in the setup is how constrained and improvisational the whole operation is. Richardson is not building levels in a conventional editor and swapping assets. He is hunting through museum archives for paintings that can be cut apart and reassembled into navigable spaces, working around whatever the painters happened to include, and finding narrative and puzzle solutions to fill gaps that opened up for entirely visual reasons.
Design by Necessity
There is something genuinely refreshing about a developer being this transparent about the unglamorous middle part of making a game. Richardson is not describing a grand plan. He is describing a problem he could not solve, shelving it, stumbling onto an answer months later by accident, and then following the thread wherever it went.
The trilogy draws on what he calls a Renaissance-paintings-come-to-life style, and Death of the Reprobate is one of three critically acclaimed entries, according to Richardson’s own description on Xbox Wire. The piece does not offer review scores or sales figures, but the framing suggests the games have found an audience willing to follow Richardson into some genuinely odd corners.
A bucket of pink cow dung as a puzzle item is, by any measure, a strange place to end up. The fact that it grew from a surplus door in a carpenter’s house interior, via a detour through a 200-year-old Dutch painting, is the kind of design archaeology that tends to get lost once a game ships. Richardson wrote it down, which is worth something on its own.
What is The Immortal John Triptych?
It is a trilogy of adventure games developed by Joe Richardson under the studio Joe Richardson Games. The games are built entirely from chopped-up Renaissance paintings and described by the developer as critically acclaimed titles, with Death of the Reprobate being one of the three entries.
How did the pink cow dung item come about?
According to a piece written by developer Joe Richardson on Xbox Wire, the item grew out of an improvised design solution to a surplus-door problem in Death of the Reprobate. An unexpected chain of reactions, including a chance discovery while browsing museum catalogues, eventually turned a layout headache into the strange puzzle item.
What artistic style do the games in The Immortal John Triptych use?
The games are made entirely from chopped-up Renaissance paintings, which the developer describes as a Renaissance-paintings-come-to-life style. Because source material cannot simply be created or removed, level design decisions are heavily constrained by whatever paintings are available.