Spirit Siege - Game Design Kickstarter Updates

 During our Kickstarter campaign, there were a number of game features we wanted to explain in greater detail. For our daily backer updates, I made these explanatory panels to give visual interest to what might have otherwise been walls of text, using copy from our game designers and Caitlyn Patten's character art.

Spirit Siege - Featured Characters

During our Kickstarter campaign, we wanted to highlight the units and teach our backers some basic strategies. I made up these handy informational panels for 15 featured characters using information from our game designers and Caitlyn Patten's adorable character art.

 

Information Density is Fun!

By far, this chart was the most fun piece of graphic design I created for Spirit Siege's Kickstarter campaign. It needed to convey a lot of information and make it easy to see what the backers would recieve at each tier. Many of these types of charts simply use X's to indicate whether items are included in different backer tiers, but we used small graphic representations of each item instead, repeating written information visually where relevant. More visual appeal, easier to parse, and strategic redundancy for the win.

What made this project particularly fun was cramming a lot of information into a really tight space. Over the many iterations shown below, I adjusted things like column widths and icon designs to accommodate the changing character length of item names and the current number of backer tiers.

Spirit Siege - Kickstarter Banners & Reward Sub-Banners

Lots of graphic design for Spirit Siege's Kickstarter page. The main section banners look like the princess example above. Each one features one of Caitlyn's adorable characters.

Below are some of the sub-banners for the Rewards section, where we go into detail about each reward item. I designed these sub-banners to be smaller, less attention-grabbing, and to feel indented, so that it would be clear that you are looking at a sub-section header even when you're deep inside the long long rewards section of page.

There are more examples on our Kickstarter page, but these are the ones where I created the icon art on the left. Caitlyn made the art on the others.

A Fistful of Duckies Brochure

Outside

Doing some graphic design this week in preparation for DigiPen's Career Fair. Here's the team brochure for the game. A stack of our business cards will be paper-clipped inside over the whales. 

Inside 

Fistful of Duckies Style Guide

This is going to be a long post, but it has lots of pictures, so bear with me. 

Pre-production is coming to a close and parts of production are well underway now for my team's senior game, A Fistful of Duckies. Here are some of the pages from our style guide. 

We're targeting Android and iOS tablets to show off the art better than we could on a tiny phone screen.

Farm Blitz and Dragon Box were also two of the games that originally got me interested in the learning games and games for change space. Combining learning objectives with truly engaging game play is an ambitious challenge, and both games carried it off beautifully in their own way.

We want a combination of dark, creepy, and cute for our game. I absolutely love the color palette and chalk pastel texture of the Monsters Inc. concept art. Shaun Tan's monsters are adorable and weird, and Rayman Origins gave us a great solution for readability: smooth gradient cell shading on the characters, lush painted textures in the background.

Parker Pierce designed our carnival barker host. I wrote the character description and designed the color scheme.

My job as the Art Director is to make sure everything fits seamlessly into our world and supports the artistic vision for the game. These ground rules are a starting point to keep everything looking unified.

Our game has a limited palette to emulate the inherent restrictions of a single box of chalk pastels. By playing two divergent colors off each other instead of mixing a middle point, we'll be using optical mixing for extra vibrancy and texture.

Target objects will be lighter and stand off from the darker scenery and background pieces.

Amendment:
We've added Terrana Cliff as another Prop Designer & Concept Artist as of Jan. 2013, and Justin Jacox is now our sound designer.

Hadiyah Color Turn-Around

Warrior Woman Game!

Started pre-production on a new game with a new team. We knew we wanted a story with a strong female protagonist set in a lush fantasy world. 

The game features a young male aspiring hero, Aidan, who got himself in over his head and is being held captive. You play as his strong middle-aged mother, a total bad-ass blacksmith named Hadiyah, to defeat the god-villain and rescue your son.  

First and foremost, our heroine will be reasonably dressed - no battle bikinis here. Secondly, I was drawn to a warm color palette, which suggested a hot arid environment. 

Tashi & Hom Graphic Novel

Tashi & Hom is a game featuring a young boy, Tashi, and his companion blob, Hom, magically hacking and slashing their way through waves of delightful, adorable, and voracious enemies.

In addition to working on the game, I also made a graphic novel version of the main characters' backstory based on the established game mythos. The graphic novel isn't technically canon anymore, but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

Character design for Tashi & Hom by Tyler Stuart. World and premise was a collective effort by Papertooth Games. I authored and created the graphic novel by fleshing out story details, writing the script, designing secondary characters, creating page layouts, and producing the final art. 

Tashi & Hom Game Menus

Pause menu, confirmation menu, lose screen, and win screen from Tashi & Hom, a hack-and-slash action game about a little boy and his magical companion fighting their way through waves of delightful enemies in stylized Bhutanese-inspired temples.

Ctrl P Print

This was an exercise in conveying sound effects and intonation in a purely visual medium. If you haven't already seen Eddie Izzard's "Glorious," it is definitely worth the watch.

Bonbon Voyage - Gates Orthographic

The next orthographic for Bonbon Voyage. 

As the player approaches the hedge maze, the first thing he finds is a large gated yard filled with tantalizing candy treats. The initial idea was to slam the gates closed behind the player, forcing him to make his way to the gingerbread house in order to escape. The further we got into game development, however, the more we realized that this step wasn't necessary - the player wanted to explore whether or not he was locked in. Closing the gates only served to frustrate those avid explorers who insistented on scouring the whole game world to illuminate every last lamppost.

Bonbon Voyage - Hedge Orthographics

This is the first orthographic design I did for Bonbon Voyage, a game in which the player must work his way through a labyrinth of hedges and candy to reach the gingerbread house in the center. 

We knew we'd be using a ton of hedge pieces and connecting them at odd angles, so the cylindrical topiary piece served to hide the corners and create visual interest without limiting how the hedge units could fit together.

The candy cane lanterns lit up when approached by the player, helping him to recognize territory he'd already explored.

Goes Around - Prop Design

Here are the orthographic designs I did of prop and scenery units for my film, Goes Around.

Jay W. Aplegren

Meet Jay, the antagonist of my spring film project, Goes Around. Jay's kind of a jerk. But don't worry, he's going to get what's coming to him. 

Character Design of Joni Johnston

This character design is based off a good friend of mine. I wanted to play with proportions and shapes while clearly expressing her personality and style.  

Anatomy of the Hand