Designing enemies for Selfish

One of the tasks that I have been doing is designing the enemies for our game.
It was kind of a joint process with making the main character. I started with sketching a lot of different fishes and asked the group for what they were looking for, which sketches they liked the most and what about it that they liked. These are the sketches that were later deemed too bland for the main character, but we got a bunch of aspects from those early sketches that were used for the finished product or that inspired the end result in some way.

We had decided that we wanted 3 different enemies in the end so we then tried to put aspects we like together to create fishes we liked.

Enemy 1 was made when I was doing sketches for the main character, we really liked the design style of him , but felt he was a bit too mean looking and did not seem like a main character so we decided to have him as an enemy instead.

Since enemy 1 was the first fish design to be approved of, we had him in mind when designing the rest of the enemies as well as the main character. We wanted to keep that colorful style and have an expressive face.

After making a lot of sketches and using the aspects like fins and tails we liked from previous sketches, I started to get an idea of how our other enemies could look.
Enemy 2 and 3 came to be about the same time. It was very much a trial and error with me making a sketch, showing it to the group and then adjusting it.

Enemy 1 was colored at the same time as I was doing the sketch because I felt that maybe it would make the design come through more and show the feeling I was envisioning to the rest of the team. On the other hand when I did the coloring for enemy 2 and 3 I had to think of what kind of color would differentiate them and what would be seen against the background.

When I was happy with the colors and the overall look for the enemies, I started making them look presentable for the game. I made the outlines first, filled in with the base color and then on a separate layer I added the shadows and highlights. Since we didn’t know if we wanted the enemies to have weapons I made the fins separate so that we could implement them as their own images in unity.

We ended up with three enemies that has easily recognizable silhouettes and separate colors to make them even more distinguishable. Sadly because of time issues we probably will only be able to use enemy 1 (red)and 3 (green) in the actual game.

About Mikaela Åhrlin

2016 Graphics

View all posts by Mikaela Åhrlin →