Designing our Critter
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At the time of writing this, CritterFlux has already been presented at the Gotland Game Conference and we received a lot of praise over our character design and artstyle. Our critter was apparently rather adorable! Although I would argue that the animations and movements of the little creature also added to the overall cuteness-factor. So was the successfull appearance of our critter a fluke, or did we actually put some thought into all of this? You be the judge as I’ll take you through the process. In the beginning, we on the art-team did a lot of brainstorming. I looked at a lot of animals, particularly the young, and figured the common denominator are big heads and big eyes. We wanted the design to be very simplistic without a lot of detail, particularly since it was for a game built for mobile android devices. In the early stages, I experimented a bit with looking at plants and swedish fauna. I didn’t want the critter to look like an animal from earth, I wanted it to be somewhat alien, something new. Although, I imagine my love for dinosaurs and dragons shone through on the concept we actually chose in the end, as it is really quite similar to a long-neck dinosaur… I gave it a sort of twisted, uneven mouth that almost reaches from one side of the head to the other. I fell for the curvy and innocent shapes mixed together with the sharp edges. It has odd proportions, something I found very charming. The middle, juvenile, stage is constructed using the adult model as a basis. To make it more clear it is the stage before the adult stage, I removed a few spikes and a pair of legs. I wanted it to feel a bit more like a blob that eventually shapes into it’s final form, like a tadpole. It received the nickname “Jabba” as in the Jabba The Hutt on the team however… The baby stage was actually reworked. Originally it was a small little blob with four thin legs and round feet. It turned out to be too different from the other two stages of our critter and was re-modelled. The end result was much more satisfying! 
Models and concept made by me, textures by Jasmina Softic. Can you imagine that the plan in the beginning was to make this game in polygon-art and with characters without eyes? The idea was never tested, as we tried on a set of eyes on the critters one day and fell inlove with them! We have Jasmina on the team to thank for that.  |