FINAL RESULT
Hymble Ventures - Tranzfuser 2023 Trailer
Full demo credits
JJ Fox - Project lead, producer, character designer
Emanuele Alessandri - Programmer
Alexandre Alves - 3D artist
Adityavikram Joshi - Level designer
DEVELOPMENT
Enemies
Lady Long Legs
The original brief was for that of a plant that shot out a projectile.
After brainstoming, we found the spider idea to be appealing so we chose to developed that further.
For the design, I wanted to make them look delicate enough that it's obvious that they would attack from a distance but still dangerous enough that they aren't allies. I also wanted where the projectile came from to be very obvious.
After the addition of the sense health bar system, a second variant was created so that we had an enemy that effected the sound bar and the original design now effects the smell bar. I think the design adapts well to the new concept though I would change the colour scheme from purple based to yellow based to match smell UI and collectable.
Testopod
The brief for the testopod was a tortoise like enemy that would charge at the player.
While designing them, they drifted away from the tortoise idea in order to better fit with the mushroom and slime theming of the level and to balance mobility and strudyness in the design.
In the end, I was drawn to the last design because a) the spikes on the head was an obvoius indicator that they would attack from a melee range, b) the spikes connected them to Lady Long Legs' design and c) the lack of legs meant that we wouldn't have to rig and animate them.
Again like with Lady Long Legs, if I had done this design after the introduction of the sense bars, I would have used an orange based colour scheme to match with the UI and collectable instead of the pink and purple.
Environment
The brief for the environment was a creepy forest and I was given refernece images of mushrooms.
I wanted everything to look unnatural and infected with a lot of slime, mushrooms and glowing effects but still cartoony and colourful to match with the overal tone of the game.
Props
I spent some time refining and polishing the pre-existing designs for the fruit collectables.
Because the nose and hands weren't going to appear in the level, I didn't take them past the sketch stage and instead produced full concept art for the other three.
In the end, the potions were cut from the game to simplify the amount of collectables.
Cutscenes
For the demo, we decided to add visual novel style cutscenes which I storyboarded and made the assets for.
We took a comic books style approach using panels and sprites animated on a timeline in combination with the text.
UI
I revamped the HUD to be clearer and easier to read whilst inkeeping with the overal aesthetics and tone.
From my research of other platformers, I wanted the UI elements to have strongly defined shapes using colour and line and to avoid clutter by dedicating corners to specific purposes i.e the top left is only for the collectable counters.
After the introduction of the sense bars, I had to rework the UI again to accomodate it. I found fitting in six seperate bars into a HUD without being intrusive to be tricky but I think I managed to pull it off.
Key Art
For Insomnia, each team had to have a piece of key art to be printed on their stand.
I wanted to focus on the main characters and to get across the feeling of adventure and discovery symonymous with similar platformers.
For the final piece, I had to take into the printing requirements for the image as well as the setup of the stand. The monitor was to cover the bottom of the image, therefore I made sure that Hymble and Codee were in the top two thirds.