Three games, 10 years, one Unity project: Piecing together The Immortal John Triptych

Made with Unity, The Immortal John Triptych collects three critically acclaimed adventure games – Four Last Things (2017), The Procession to Calvary (2020), and Death of the Reprobate (2024) – each built entirely from cut-up Renaissance and medieval paintings animated into playable worlds. Today, publisher Akupara Games brings all three to new console platforms in a single combined launcher, with quality-of-life updates, new controller support, and behind-the-scenes content.

Joe Richardson, the creative mind behind The Immortal John Triptych, is a solo, self-taught UK game dev who started in art school and backed into Unity almost by accident. We asked him about rebuilding a decade-old project engine by engine, merging three separate Adventure Creator projects into one without them falling apart, and why he builds his games backwards – art first, puzzles second, story last.

How did you find your way into game development? And how did The Immortal John Triptych kick off?

This project started with Four Last Things, which was my second game. My route into games came from the art side – I did an illustration course (even though I can't really draw) and landed on making a video game almost by accident. That was the start of me using collage: taking old paintings – Bosch, Bruegel, that style of crazy, detail-packed painting – and making them alive and interactable. That idea kicked off the whole project.

Four Last Things took about a year to make. I wasn't very commercially minded, so I was pretty broke – I needed to get it out the door. When it was finished, I knew I hadn't quite done the idea justice, which is when the triptych was born. Even at that stage I was picturing three games (because triptych sounds cooler than diptych). Four Last Things is based on Bosh’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights – the first scene pans down the left panel, the last scene pans down the right, so that game was already a triptych in my mind. Extending that idea to three separate games just made sense.

You started development in Visionaire, not Unity. What made you move, and how does Adventure Creator from the Unity Asset Store fit into your process?

Visionaire was actually great – I needed it, because I came from the art side. Jumping straight into something like Unity would have been completely overwhelming. Visionaire put everything into nice little boxes, safe spaces to explore one thing at a time. But after finishing Four Last Things, I wanted to do a mobile port, and Visionaire did what it did really well – but if you wanted to do anything else, you couldn't. So I decided to rebuild the entire game in Unity, which was also an easy way in – a way to learn Unity inside a project I already knew inside out.

What I'm actually using is Adventure Creator, an Asset Store plugin for building narrative and point-and-click games without code – it does all the hand-holding that Visionaire used to do. But now I'm inside the Unity ecosystem, so if I want to do something a bit outside the box, like the sword mechanic in The Procession to Calvary, I can. There's no “make a sword” button in Visionaire Studio. In Unity, it felt like I was free to have bigger ideas.

Akupara is building direct-control controller support for the console versions, and you've said that's happening entirely outside Adventure Creator. Where do you feel the plugin's real limits are?

Between Adventure Creator and Unity, I don't feel like there are real limitations. That controller work is happening completely outside Adventure Creator, but because it's built to interface easily with the rest of Unity, it all still connects back and plays well together.

Merging three games built across different Unity and Adventure Creator versions into one project sounds challenging. What actually broke?

Honestly, after praising Adventure Creator for the last half hour – every issue we hit was an Adventure Creator issue. Updating the underlying Unity versions went surprisingly smoothly. Updating Adventure Creator itself did not – one update changed the whole movement system in a way that broke the game, so we're on an up-to-date version of Unity, but a several-years-old version of Adventure Creator.

I should note that Adventure Creator isn't built to let you put three separate games together – why would it be? There was a lot of stuff with variables clashing, dialogue IDs clashing, even scene names clashing. I'm not very creative with names, so I had scenes called “Town,” “Village,” “House” across all three games – at one point three different scenes were literally all named “Town.” Each of those is easy to work around on its own, but there was so much of it that it took a lot of maneuvering. I expected it to be potentially impossible going in, and was pleasantly surprised to get through it in a few months. It seems stable now – though underneath, there's a whole world I don't fully understand. It often feels like building a house of cards, and toward the end I get nervous about changing anything.

Did unifying the three games change how players will experience them?

Artistically, it forces you to see them as one piece and think about the links between them. But practically, we've changed a lot too – new content, including some cut scenes from the originals built up into small playable moments with developer commentary, and full controller support with direct movement.

The biggest thing for me, though, is smaller: the dialogue box from Death of the Reprobate, my most recent game, is now used in the first two as well. Looking back at the original text in those games, it's genuinely hard to read – no background, an ugly color. I can't believe I let people play it like that. Now there's a proper background and the text is legible. I didn't change the writing, just the presentation – the words are all the same, you can just read them now.

Your games are built entirely from real paintings. What does that process actually look like?

I start by scouring museum archives – hundreds of paintings – saving anything interesting into folders by content: landscapes, landscapes that look particularly green, interiors of pubs, whatever. Once a folder has enough similar material, I try to build it into a scene, starting with the background. I'm not disciplined about it – I'll be working on three scenes at once, and something that doesn't fit one will get moved into another. It's tinkering, tinkering, tinkering, then animating the pieces that can loop well.

Only once I've got a scene do I bring it into Unity – and even then I have no idea what the story is, no idea what the puzzles are. I walk around the space trying to make connections from one room to the next, making sure things are interconnected rather than everything happening in one place. Most people write the whole game first, then build it in grey boxes, then put the artwork on at the end. I do it exactly backwards – the last thing I figure out is what the game's actually about. Puzzles come from walking the finished art and spotting potential – that looks like a well, there's a bucket over there, what do we need water for. Story comes dead last. There's been a point in every game where I've genuinely not been sure it was going to make sense. I've pulled it together three times in a row, but sometimes it feels like luck that it lands.

How do you plan a trilogy's story when you're building each game backwards like that?

Luckily, the three games in The Immortal John Triptych don't have an obvious direct through-line – you play three different protagonists, one after another, with one character who recurs in each. I was thinking of it more like an actual Renaissance triptych, where the three panels show completely different scenes but are thematically about the same thing, and the left panel often mirrors the right – Eden and Hell, two sides of a coin. Writing the last game, I was consciously mirroring the first: in the first game, you're doing bad deeds for a good reason; in the last, good deeds for bad reasons.

What did bringing proper controller support for consoles actually involve?

The core decision was whether to do it properly or do it easily. The easy version is a virtual cursor you move with the thumbstick, and it feels bad – your brain wants the stick to move the character, not a cursor. The alternative is direct control of the character, which is what most modern adventure games do, but that changes the whole game. You're no longer looking at the screen as one space full of things to click on; there's a physical space you walk around in, looking for things to interact with. That meant solving problems like hotspots the character physically can't walk to – we built a system where you use the right stick to look around the scene for things that aren't reachable on foot.

In the end, we chose to do it properly, which was a huge amount of extra work, but it pays off – it feels noticeably better than a cursor on a controller, and I'd argue it plays better than the original point-and-click too. Even on PC with the choice of mouse or controller, people pick the controller because it feels like a normal, modern game.

If you were starting this project today, what would you do differently?

Honestly, I'd probably still mess it up. The easy answer is I'd go straight to Unity and Adventure Creator and skip the trouble – but the truth is I wasn't ready to. Even with Adventure Creator's safety net, it would have been overwhelming, having never made a game or written any code. The one thing I'd tell myself: don't rebuild the entire game just for a mobile port. That was ridiculous – though in hindsight it gave me the foundation everything else was built on. If I change one thing, everything downstream changes, and I'm happy with how it's turned out. So, honestly – I'd change nothing.

The Immortal John Triptych is out today on Steam, PlayStation®5, Nintendo Switch™ and Nintendo Switch™ 2, and Xbox Series X|S. Explore more Made with Unity games on our Steam Curator page, and check out more stories from Unity developers on the Unity Blog and Resource Hub.

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