Tall Grass art assets generation

We still didn’t have time to write a post-mortem for Tall Grass. Too many cool LD games to play, christmas shopping, steam sale… things are frantic this week.

Oh yeah, Tall Grass was featured on IndieStatik’s 28 Free Game Picks From Ludum Dare 28 post! Don’t forget to check their list out, there are lots of great games there 😀

But while we don’t write a detailed post on what we did right and what went wrong in our very first Ludum Dare entry, we decided to post some art Cauã did on Sunday and Monday. At first we had some ‘game designer art’ for the creatures, objects and obstacles, then he did some artist magic and voila, all of a sudden we had pretty things in the screen 😀

A few alternatives for the main creature and the protagonist’s colors.

Of course, as a good design practice, we use to do some alternative generation. That is, we try a lot of assets before choosing the right one. Cauã often nails it on the first try or so (see the tree below, for example), but that doesn’t take the merit away from this practice. We see it as a tool: it just guarantees that you won’t settle with a crappy art asset only because you didn’t try a second or third way of expressing that.

Tall Grass rocks.

The football stuff – hard to make a good ball with a square :/

Bushes, rocks and trees, that’s what forests are made of.

Bushes, trees and rocks all have the same gameplay purpose: they’re obstacles. 3 hours before the time limit, they still were all ugly rocks. With some alternatives laid out, we choose which items would make for a pretty and varied forest, and we went for a gray rock with a perspective gimmick, a green round bush, and the tree. The tree can be disproportional if put in scale with bushes, rocks and the creatures, but hey, that’s videogames!

Cauã also had to design two monsters:

A bunch of alternatives for monsters.

More monsters, trying to get all we could from a 5×5 grid.

It’s hard to make adorable little creatures inside a 5×5 pixel grid. Tall Grass being a little homage to Pokémon, we settled on making monsters that you would want to capture. Not too abstract, not too domestic. Things more like Rattata and Zubat than faceless aliens. Again, Cauã made these concepts, tried some colors, and then we discussed the more promising designs. That happened on Monday around 4P.M. here (7 hours before the time limit).

Narrowing down and playing with colors.

Narrowing down once more, and generating more alternatives.

Getting to the final designs for Bubafoos (left) and Twerkos (right).

One more design consideration: one type of monster moved horizontally, and the other kind moved vertically. This was not very clear when we were using my ‘game designer art’, but the final assets should help players identify each movement pattern. So, Bubafoos ended up looking right/left, and Twerkos gained a face and a back, so you know if he’s going up or coming down. We think that worked well :)

The final version of Tall Grass looks like this:

Twerkos, Bubafoos and Teen Pewee.

That’s it for now! If you liked what you saw, don’t forget to play and rate Tall Grass here: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=29565

Cheers! 😀