Designing enemies for a space shooter game
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I am working on a space shooter game together with five other people. It is a music game about a dragon named Riff that cannot spit fire. Instead she can spit sound waves to create music. The other dragons are bullying her for that. But justice will come! When the planet is invaded by strange crystal beings, the dragons’ only hope are the sound waves that only Riff can create. My role in the project is producer and graphic artist. Right now I am creating concept art for the crystal enemies. We want the art style to be simple and a bit cartoonish. This will help us a lot when we are going to animate the sprites. It is easier to animate a simple sprite with few colours, than an oil-painted sprite. We also want to be sure that we are capable of producing the artwork in time. So that is why we are going with a simpler design. When I created the different enemy concepts, I was following the basic principles of character design. I wanted them to have an easily recognizable silhouette in contrast to the dragon Riff who is the hero in the story. It was also important that they were pointy to further make it more clear that they are the enemies. This fits well with the idea that the enemies are made of crystals, which often can be pointy.
This was the first enemy I created. My goal was to make it hard to look at. Nothing is symmetrical. It is hard to understand where the different parts are coming from and how everything fits together. The light, pink colour is chosen to further give the sense that it is a crystal. It is ugly. Just as I wanted it to be.
When I was designing this enemy, I was inspired by typical things that are often connected to the word ”crystal”. Therefore I looked at wine glasses and crystal lamps. So I made half of the creature look somewhat like a wine glass. To keep the cartoonish style, I gave it an eye in the front. The tail looks like crystals from a crystal lamp. To wrap it up, I made it into a fish-looking creature with pointy fins that makes it look more dangerous. There will be a lot more enemies to concept before we find what we want to go with. I look forward to that. It is fun to look for different inspiration sources (like wine glasses and crystal lamps). I really think that is the way to go if you want to create something unique and different. Think outside the box!  |
