Extrasolar
Role: Art director, environment artist, UI artist and game designer.
A puzzle game where you take on the role of a Junior Extrasolar Launch technician. Drag and release the controller to launch planets, moons, meteors and comets to clean up and rebuild habitable solar systems.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Advanced Game Development
Rapid game development -
Team SPACE
2022
Celestial Bodies
For this project we decided to use round objects masking a scrolling rectangular texture, giving the illusion of rotation while keeping everything 2D. All the art is produced as vector art.
The planets and asteroids are locked on orbits around the sun.
The objects that the player launches are tied to the Unity physics sytem and are attracted to the sun’s gravity.
The game has several objectives including corrupted planets with meteors, launching new planets and moons into orbit and hitting barren planets with icy comets to make them habitable
The background is a single color field with a particle system of twinkling stars. Lighting effects are designed to be as flat as possible to maintain the vector aesthetic.
Retrovirus
Role: Art director, environment artist and game designer.
A puzzle platformer where you navigate a mutating virus through the interior of several cells. By launchinglike a slingshot and transforming into a bouncy, spiky or heavy form, your retrovirus must adapt and survive the treacherous journey to the nucleus.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Advanced Game Development
Rapid Game Development -
Team Retrovirus
2022
Sprites and tile sets
Background
The player character is a retroviral cell that changes abilities, while interacting with an environment that shares similar traits. Because of this developing a visual language for the parts of the cells and the virus was crucial:
Purple means solid, Pink means bouncy, Red means spiky and Orange means moveable.
By staying consistent with these elements we were able to flesh out several challenges and levels while maintaining the simplistic design fundamentals of “Things you’d see on a microscope”.
The game uses very few assets, so the tiles and sprites all fit on a single sheet.
It was important to the team that the game didn’t “feel flat”, despite its 2D platformer nature, so a lot of care went into giving these cells and organelles volume and personality.
Another challenge was being able to design what is Inside and what is outside:
Using different types of cellular walls as specific surfaces conected by rows of tiling tails allowed us to make rulesets in unity for building levels with a consistent language.
Large bacteria and other free-floating cells loom in the distance.
Their scale is so huge that the pixelated artstyle becomes an almost realistic take on these microorganisms.
Using dithering, transparency and paralaxing layers we built an eerie environment of imposibly large objects, reinforcing the tiny scale of the player.
Bananapus!
Role: Environment artist and game designer.
A 16-bit style beat-em-up where you play as a banana peel, awoken by some eldritch power, in a mad brawl through a junkyard crawling with possessed produce.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Advanced Game Development
Rapid Prototyping -
Capybara Studios
2022
The tiles created for this project were particularly challenging. They had to clearly communicate what was in the background and what had collision, but they also had to be bright enough to stay within the late 1980s arcade aesthetic. I opted for using a bright magenta for the ground and more muted purples for the garbage piles. Green was used to represent danger, used in the toxic pools, barricades and all enemies.
Sprite Sheet
This was the first time I got to experiment with Unity’s tile palette tool, making several variations of each individual tile. The randomization didn’t always work as expected though. More variations are needed on an environment as organic as this one. On the other hand, the trash piles could have used less detail and color on the center sections to reduce repetition.
Effects and UI
Due to the short timeframe to develop this game we decided to make as little animation frames as possible: one or two in most cases for attacks and actions. The resulting effects used Yellow for the Bananapus and Green for the enemies, reinforcing their visual identities.
Yellow is also used in the health bar, making it stand out over the admitedly oversaturated action on-screen.
Complete Environments
Blunderbuss
Role: Art director, character artist, environment artist and game designer.
A game-boy style shooter where you control Captain in Sharkface in an epic quest to reclaim your ship from a mutinous crew of bloodthirsty pirates.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Advanced Game Development
Rapid game development -
Team Sahrk
2022
Tilesheet and Spritesheet
True to its sources of inspiration, Blunderbuss uses very few assets.
All of the ships’ hulls are “built” out of only nine tiles, with the mast and sail tiles adding up to a total of fourteen. The modularity of the tiles allowed the team to build ships of different shapes and sizes.
The main character and enemies are all antropomorphic sea creatures, which became a design challenge when the time came to simplify them into pixels. Luckily the more I simplified the snout of a white shark, the happier and more child-like it seemed.
In contrast, the enemies were given a fiercer expression, which thankfully comes across even at this very low resolution. The orca boss even appears to pant savagely as it walks.
The biggest challenge was not working in pixels, but in only four colors, as this was a Game-Boy-constrained project.
I leaned heavily into strong, dark outlines to separate different characters and elements, while limiting the use of shading to just giving the sprites some volume.
