Todd the Tubby Toad
Role: Art director, character artist, technical artist, splash screen artist and game designer.
A quirky and charming adventure-puzzle platformer, where you take on the role of a tiny toad that must use his tongue to grapple, swing and zip through mazes and challenges.
This game was developed in the Unity Engine, with both mouse+keyboard and gamepad support in mind
Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Advanced Game Development
Final Group Project
Team Toadem
2023
I decided to draw the cover art in the dynamic style of old school games’ box-art. While it is a departure from the Todd’s pixel artstyle, it maintains the personality and color scheme.
Characters
Graham was colored to mesh better with level 1’s forest environment, with a slightly bluer hue than Todd.
His movements are noticeably jittery and his expression is nervous until Todd helps him escape.
As the leader of the group, Frances sports a smug demeanor and a signature look of superiority.
This all changes while she’s incased in the iceblock.
It was important for us to emphasize that these NPCs love doing what Todd can’t: jumping.
Todd’ sprite was designed to be readable and expressive at a long distance and while moving very fast.
His Tongue and arms are drawn as separate elements using the Unity line renderer.
We limited his expressions to maintain his smiling disposition regardless of the situation.
Effects
Tilesets
Every environment is comprised of a paralaxing 4-layered background, background tiles with no paralaxing, foreground tiles with collision, decoration tiles with details such as grass and dripping lava and finally interactable objects like doors and levers.
The main challenge of this project was designing backgrounds that were unique, non-repetitive and subtle enough to allow the characters and effects to pop. We took several steps to accomplish this:
During development the palette was simplified several times so they wouldn’t blend into the background or interactable objects, especially with the stone tiles.
Moving parts and machinery were also changed from silver to brass tones for greater contrast, which in turn helped deveop a steampunk aesthetic for the wizard’s tower.
Lighting effects were added to the lanterns, lava, fire and electricity. This helps draw further attention to dangerous or important elements, especially during fast mocement sections.
