After designing the city’s exterior I thought about what the buildings inside might look like. For this I decided to design the Senate/Parliament building. Situated in the capitol and inspired by St. Peter’s Cathedral and the Reichstag, this is where the senators convene for meetings and decide policy. It consists of a large central dome room with a stained glass ceiling and a skylight, as well as outer buildings with offices, meeting rooms and archives.
In-Game this location would be playable and fully explorable, but would be destroyed and turned into memorial gardens after the time-skip. After pushback from senators on policy, Lucien and his advisors would orchestrate the burning (undecided) of the Pantheon, during session. This would allow Lucien to place blame his enemies (the Ophirans), eliminate his senators and declare a state of emergency/martial law in the ensuing panic. This event was inspired by and would parallel the burning of the Reichstag and Hitler’s Declaration of martial law in the aftermath.
Initial Dome design: i like the idea of it being two-tiered.
As an experiment I started designing some glass portraits of previous leaders for the ceiling, but these were not included in the final piece.
An early colour concept of the Senate.
The process of creating the dome
And then constructing the surrounding building.
i felt that it didn’t have enough colour so I made the pillars into red marble and then added clouds for contrast.
I then started designing banners and the Sigil of the Royal Family. Since this is the symbol for a fascist and authoritarian empire I took inspiration from real-world fascist imagery, as well as religious imagery and ancient roman sigils. I ended up with an angel with spread wings which matched the silhouette i had already come up with: a cross with a circle in the middle. Variants of this shape appear as symbols throughout the story – the three points of the cross represent the three suns and the central circle represents the planet, while the cross also evokes Roman Catholic imagery.
After making some alterations with feedback from my tutors I ended up with this as my final piece.