Building Alliances: Tower designs and Concept Art

 With designs for Microplastic enemy thumbnails done, I went back and refined my ideas for how the "Pellet" enemies may look. This is a part of my role as the 2D lead; providing the designs that my team members will select for adaptation into the final game.

These designs work off the images produced by our director, adding more detail to them and altering specific forms whilst keeping the overall shape of the enemy the same. That is, these enemies - based off the "Pellet" designs - are largely spherical, yet I altered specific textures and details in the design to create a more visually unique enemy. As a group, we discussed how exactly such designs would be used in the game: we believe that our game will, with the camera being pulled back, have a largely simplistic style, and as such these more detailed designs may be used in loading screens or splash art, showing how the enemies look in a more detailed and close-up form.

The initial Microplastic Pellet design, drawn by Seb.

I have also worked on developing designs for the towers used in our game.
In our project, Towers are used to defend the regions of the body from Microplastics. We have concepts for three such towers:
-Bone Marrow towers: These spawn white blood cells, which combat and capture Microplastic enemies.
-Fungal Spore towers: These act as close-range defence towers, showering Microplastics with damaging spores.
-Fungal Artillery towers: These act as long-range defence towers, launching projectiles to afar Microplastics.
As these three towers all bear drastically different designs, I went about creating several sketches to represent them. I focussed on creating visually disparate designs in this process so that each tower could be visually identified at a glance. This would be important in-game, as it could help in showing where different areas of strength and weakness lay.

In these designs, the Bone Marrow tower looks to appear as a protruding bone, sheared to expose the bone marrow within. This is relevant to the design as White Blood Cells are produced in bone marrow tissue (Britannica 2024). Additionally, for the Fungal Spore tower, I drew a more square shape; a cell, cuboid in form, with bracket fungi across its form. I chose bracket fungi as their large, disc shape could overhang the path which the Microplastic Enemies follow, showing how spores drop from them to create the large clouds of mist that act to be the tower's primary method of attack.

Bracket Fungi on a Tree (Foxglove Covert 2009)

As for the Fungal Artillery, we decided that the Artillery units would act as long-range defensive units that would act to fire single shots at Microplastic enemies. As such, we chose a design that is longer and more flexible, with "arms" that act as the launchers for these projectiles. This results in a strong visual difference in the shape language between the three towers: the Bone Marrow Towers are cylindrical and squat, the Spore towers cuboid with disc-shapes secondary shapes and the Artillery towers are longer, slender and more fluid in form.

Seb's feedback in regards to the function of the Fungal Artillery tower.

With ideas for these designs generated, I went about creating a wider piece of concept art that would show the Microplastic, Level and Tower designs I have came up with. This wider scene, though simply a piece of concept art to help the visual development of our game, could also function as a piece of splash art, perhaps shown in a loading screen or similar gallery. 

When creating this scene, I first used a perspective grid and drew in the large masses of the environment atop it. The perspective grid assisted me in ensuring that all of these forms were drawn appropriately, pushing forward the illusion of this environment being three-dimensional.

With the base sketch done I went back and created thinner line art over the forms, adding detail and texture. I then added basic, block colours to this line art, using red tones for the fleshy environment and a pale white for the bone marrow tower. I did this to place focus on to the tower, which is the main point of interest in the scene.

I then added shading to the scene, pushing the background out and adding lighting details to the tower and environment.

With the shading and lighting done I added the Microplastic enemies into the scene, choosing a design for the "Pellet" enemies and rendering it in a more detailed format. Peer research additionally indicated that Microplastics can bear bright colours, and as such I coloured these in pin and blue. These colours are not seen elsewhere in the scene, and again this puts focus on the Microplastics as primary focal points.

Final Outcome:

Though I am pleased with this piece of concept art, peer feedback indicated that the darkness and more gory detailed forms may not be appropriate for our target audience. As such, in further developments I will refine this piece of concept art to omit several of the more detailed aspects, perhaps altering colours to be brighter and perhaps including thicker lines to further obfuscate detail and show a clear divide between what I am describing and more realistic, bloody anatomy. 

Bibliography:
Britannica, 2024. White Blood Cell [online]. Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/science/white-blood-cell [Accessed 26 October 2024]

Foxglove Covert, 2009. Bracket Fungi on a Tree [online]. Available via: https://www.foxglovecovert.org.uk/blog/bracket-fungi/ [Accessed 26 October 2024]