KOATR

This page is where I’ll be sharing art, lore, character pieces, story fragments, and pieces of the world as it comes together.

Ultimately, I see KOATR’s final form as an animated hybrid project created in collaboration with many people. Because of that, the images I post here are mainly bookmarks: design notes from Aeris, not the world’s official final form.

At the center of KOATR are two lives moving toward the same catastrophe from different directions, each trying to harness the power of an ancient wormhole for the person they love.

One act breaks the world. Another tries to reach back through the wreckage.

Radio, a young tinkerer trying to reach someone she loves in the past, one salvaged part at a time.

Levon, the heir to an android empire trying to force time itself to spare the person he loves.

I’ve been building this world for the past few years, mostly as a personal project because I loved making it. Now I’m starting to share it publicly.

Thanks for looking through the rust.

Radio and Zots, a year before their world changes forever - Digital - 2026

A small scene from KOATR: Radio and Zots working on her time viewer.

This machine becomes one of the major turning points inthe story, but here it's still something rough, tough, and dangerous (shouout to old school L.A. graffiti! )

Radio builds, fixes, keeps it moving. Zots talks too much, complains, and would still throw himself in front of a train for her.

Radio in her cubby - Digital - 2026

A small pocket in the South Larks. Metallin walls, notes, scavenged parts, half-working machines, textpaks. Aurelia "Radio" Villajeros, one of KOATR's main characters, tinkering with cheap tech in her cubby.

Dyson City - Blender - 2023

Dyson City - Digital - 2023

Dyson City, Jadeya.

This is where Levon grew up. Among cheap rusting metallin and fetid squalor, choking on the grime that oozed from the world around him.

The shacks along the number 2 train line in Oxidus Gardens. Behind them stands the first Jovayas android factory, the very one he would later come to run.

This piece started as a Blender blockout and was later painted over in Photoshop.

For me, the Blender project helped define Levon’s beginnings. This gave me a first person view of Levon's early surroundings. Blender rocks!

The very first words I wrote when jotting down notes about the character were, “Born into the stifling suffocation of extreme poverty,” and his origin environment had to reflect that.

By this time, I already knew the world of KOATR would resemble an old New York hybrid set in an alternate version of Earth, so Levon’s early days would reflect the “street urchin” of 1930s New York, but with an Aerisian twist.

This photograph by Jacob Riis - one of my inspirations for Levon's early life.

Aerisian Nanobots - Blender - 2026

Early Blender blockouts for the KOATR nanobots, based on their function as neural pathway architects: scouts, pruners, builders, bridgers, and regulators. These are not final story art yet, but shape studies for the tiny machines hidden inside Aerisian medicine, sold to the public as care. Quietly, they teach the brain where to grow, what to strengthen, and what to cut away.

Nanobots in KOATR

Android Doctor administering nanobot spray - Digital - 2026

Nanobots play a central role in King of All the Rust, serving as both blessing and curse to those who receive them.

Publicly, they are hidden inside routine medical care. Privately, they are part of a secretive program designed to shape the minds of Aerisian citizens from birth.

Their primary purpose is to keep higher understanding of the wormhole out of public reach. Their secondary purpose is regulation: guiding intelligence, limiting dangerous curiosity, reinforcing social order, and stratifying the population.

In KOATR, the nanobots build pathways, cut pathways, and help decide which thoughts are allowed to grow.

But with this regulation comes stagnation, and innovation is salvation for the rulers of Aeris.

Enter the Wildcard

Wildcard nanobot pruning neural pathway - Digital - 2026

Unlike standard nanobots, wildcard variants do not suppress dangerous thought. Instead, wildcards seek out the recipient’s strongest areas of interest, curiosity, talent, dream, or obsession, then magnify them.

To the rulers of Aeris, they are a necessary risk. The wildcard nanobot variants, administered "randomly" among the popuplation, are a way to restart invention in a civilization made too obedient to grow on its own.

KING OF ALL THE RUST - Radio and Zots at Sorting Lot No.9 - Digital - 2026

Radio. Zots. Levon. The Wormhole. Zero Day.

All have lived with me for the past four years in the form of King of All the Rust, a work of love that began as a background story for a game I was building for myself in Unreal Engine.

Creating this world has brought me great joy but a good friend said that one's work is never truly finished until it has been shared.

I think I’m finally at a point where I can share bits and pieces of this world with you here. May it bring at least another, the joy it has brought me.

"Quick Take a Flick" - Digital - 2020

This drawing from February 2020 might be the first real spark of what eventually became King of All the Rust.

I wanted to capture the kind of scene you might come upon while riding a bus through a city on a distant planet, an alternate earth: you look out the window, pull out your recording device, and snap a quick shot of the locals at a food stand while they pose and mug.

So much of KOATR’s design language was already forming here. The homemade android on the left as a sidekick. The facial and body markings. The augmentations. The "alien but familar" vibes. Even the bioluminescent fauna.

A thought remained after I'd moved on from this drawing. After this snapshot, where did these people go? What did their homes look like? What did the streets sound like? What kind of world had produced them?

This was one of the seeds for King of All the Rust.

-537

"At the Ticket Booth with Tuck" - Digital - 2020

The day after drawing “Quick, Take a Flick,” I decided to explore the idea behind the robot sidekick.

The face kept flashing in my head: the grinning cat. Mischievous. Glowing eyes embedded in what could at first be mistaken for its mouth.

“Hey, whatsamatta wid chu!” Gruff, gravelly, rusting voice.

He’d wear a T-shirt for modesty, but the shirt would be adorned with a vulgar drawing or some slang saying.

“Botsy,” the name came. That’s what these guys were. Homemade creations. Wisecracking, slang-dropping, shit-talking, loyal to a T, and willing to lay down their lives for their creators.

Put together piece by scrap, bartered or traded for, loaded with black-market attitude cards.

Only the best.

There’s a bit of old Bugs Bunny cartoons, the Three Stooges, and a touch of 1970s New York in your typical botsy.

-537

"A Typical Gang on a Typical Day in a Typical Apocalypse" - Digital - 2020

The same week I worked on the drawings above, "Quick take a flick," and "At the ticket booth with Tuck," I finished this one. The design was heavily influenced by the raiders of the Fallout world, one of my favorite games and art concepts. Shout out to the Road Warrior.

The idea behind the drawing was to depict cyborgs who'd once lived in an orderly world but that world had collapsed violently and suddenly.

Like the raiders in the Road Warrior world, everyday people transformed into monsters, so too would the humans who'd undergone cybernetic augmentation become monsters in the world I'd depicted.

The relation to KOATR? the design for these two became the visual guide for what would become the androids post Zero Day.

-537

"A Return to the Excavation" - Digital - 2020

My tribute to:

The Excavation of Pompeii - Filippo Palizzi

The relation to KOATR? none. Just the last image I drew the week of February 2020 in which the first seeds of the world of King Of All The Rust were planted.

And here we are.

The Wormhole is one of the central forces in KOATR.

The title King of All the Rust started as a phrase uttered by a man trying to rule what was left of the world he destroyed.

But in KOATR, rust is more than decay. Rust is memory, guilt, survival, and all the things still moving long after they should have stopped.

As for the logo, the grinning cat: I imagined a grime-filled soda shop/gas station. Chrome, rust, and grease. After dark, the neon lights blaze on loudly.

The Ring over Aeris

Before anyone understood what it was, they gave it names.

A celestial event. A sign. A recurring cyclical event.

The wormholes' breath.

It's promise to the life it once loved.

The ring returns across time, and beneath it, fear becamemyth, myth became worship, and worship gave way to study.

In KOATR, the ring is the visible heartbeat of something ancient, a force people keep mistaking for a tool.