Fantasy Kingdoms

I did some work on the Facebook game Fantasy Kingdoms with a few assets as well as some creatures. It was always a great experience because when working on assets it was a very individual thing where it was yours from start to finish. Also it was very foreign art style to me that I had to get accustomed to, which is always a good challenge. The other great thing is that you get a lot of direct feedback from fans whenever an asset comes out because one of the main draws for the players is getting something new to place on your isometric playspace.

A few of my best pieces I think were the clockwork doll and the spider carriage, both supposed to be within the steampunk sets:

 

Eventually I was tasked with creating creatures and animating them. I tried to bring a new precedent and add value to the creatures by having them go through a longer cycle of movement since in general creatures in the game were assets that just kept a constant idle motion going. So first we have the Fae, which is a kind of magical deer version of the centaur with nature elements:

Then there's the Valentine Pegasus Carriage which was a very good seller I hear. Really not my favorite but it was a bit complicated to put together a carriage and flying horse for tween animation and I am proud of it:

Chompy

So there's this children's flash game called Pyramid Pile Up that I worked on sometime in 2009. I created and animated the main character, which is a strange squirrel type monster that thwarts your attempts to balance your daily food pyramid with healthy things. It's part of the Playnormous branding where the company goal was the usual edutainment where games were made to get children to have the notion of health but not being hit over the head with it, so what you end up with on Pyramid Pile Up is just a fun puzzle game. I feel like it was pretty successful and for sure it's one of the projects I'm most proud about since I started working in video games.

Unfortunately the game has become somewhat irrelevant because the USDA changed from a Pyramid altogether to a strange plate set up for proportions, but it's still up there for play at any time!

So one thing that made this project a great challenge for me was the push of an art style I was not used to by my art director McKee Frazior. He generally has a very good iconic graphical sense that floats towards a more minimalist nature. Everything I had been working on with him before had been somewhat of a push in that direction on my part, but Pyramid Pile Up was very much a game where he was the lead in everyway: he did all the sounds and music, the majority if not all of the game design, and had this great idea for an art style with a paper cut out feel.

So he set me out to work to start concepting the monster:

 

It's pretty crazy, but I basically went from stranger concepts that were too detailed or silly for the look of the game to a more iconic and rounded character that would fit the detail needed for the size on the screen and not feel out of place in the game. I was way out of my comfort zone, but it was fun. McKee then me start with finals in Illustrator as we did vector for most things in the Playnormous universe, then exporting it all into PNG to get the shadows and not bog down Flash with vector and filter information. Here's some color passes I found lying around:

Oh yeah, his name is Chompy. At some point someone dubbed him that during a meeting but I don't necessarily recall who. Here's a test swf I have for all of the animations I did for him in game:

So this has been a very wordy post since I loved this project. But it reminds me why I love working as an artist. Also I ended up doing some unique animations for some of the Playnormous monsters where they move across the header of the website in various ways. So I'm going to end with an awesome swf of Chompy sneezing:

Monster Island IV Yet Again Intro

One of the major contributions I made to Syfy Monster Island were the boss intro screens. The boss battles lacked any kind of notification for a while and I suggested a flashy intro to create excitement upon landing on a boss. So I designed a sort of template that had could rotate palette depending on the boss and then have a snippet of animation of the boss before doing that slow motion thing. Here's one with Megacroc (A Drew version of the Syfy creature):


It echos a sort of 60/70s horror film look with kind of rough paint splotches but since it's for a Facebook game, it retained an amount of color and cheeriness. Here's my test image using Pterodactyl:

And speaking of Pterodactyl, I think the animations I did for him are one of my favorites in game.


Pterodactyl was more Drew Johnson art, so on that note, here's another one of Drew's characaters I animated, the disgusting Corpsewalker: