How a Bucket Full of Pink Cow Dung Became an Item in The Immortal John Triptych

Joe Richardson’s latest development anecdote shows how Death of the Reprobate keeps turning art constraints into gameplay. While building a house interior, he needed a dead end, then a courtyard scene, then a large static prop to cover a rough edit. That chain eventually led to a bull, a water pump, and a joke about tinted water becoming pink cow excrement.

The practical takeaway for developers is familiar: in a hand-assembled game, composition problems can become design opportunities if the scene can support interaction. Richardson is working from chopped-up historical paintings, so every edit has to respect the source material’s shapes, silhouettes, and seams. That makes even simple layout fixes a puzzle in themselves, especially when the game also needs readable navigation, animation-friendly framing, and diegetic audio.

The bull scene also shows how quickly a visual gag can harden into systemic logic. Once the bull’s pose suggested a visual punchline, the puzzle design followed naturally: feed the bull, vary the food, collect differently colored output, and use it elsewhere. It’s a reminder that in comedy-adventure design, the line between prop placement, animation constraints, and puzzle logic is often very thin.

The Immortal John Triptych is due on Xbox on August 27, bundling Four Last Things, The Procession to Calvary, and Death of the Reprobate with extras like deleted scenes, updated language parity, manual saves for Four Last Things, and new content. For teams building stylized or collage-based games, it’s a useful case study in how production limitations can...