My first Tiny Defense update is ready. Excited?
Lee Lee has been hard at work. Right now her job is not to create sprites, but instead explore different styles, colours and concepts so we can nail down what the final game will look like.
This is an important process and might take a little while! Once we’re done, the next step will be to begin to turn these sprites into game ready sprites – smaller, more stylised and more polished. Before that happens though, feast your eyes upon these:
Monster Concept 1:
This was the first batch of monsters Lee Lee made. As you can tell there is a wide variety of styles and concepts. This is especially important, not just so that we have an idea of what we like, but also we will know what to avoid.
My personal favourites? 1, 8, 10 and 30. Lee Lee loves 31!
Monster Concept 2:
I really drilled Lee Lee with feedback. You should see my emails to this girl, each one is a freaking essay, I feel sorry for her. She really took the feedback to heart, and came back with a second iteration.
My personal favourites here? All of them. But especially 6, 9 and 11.
Towers Concept 1:
This was our first dabble with towers. There is still a way to go before we settle on a style, but we sure are making progress.
My personal favourites are 31 and 32!
Reference Images.
The other important process at this stage is finding references. Games which are similar stylistically, and just down right sexy.
I’ve been digging around the internet a lot to try find great styles that we can emulate. So far I’ve found one game which nails the color and style pretty well – it’s just a bit TOO cartoony. Monster Mayhem for the iOS is definitely worth checking out:
I also love the monsters and style in maple story:
I also loved the stylistic treatment of the towers in Edge World:
Onwards!
So this weekend I’ve started getting lost in Xcode and Cocos2D. I was planning on banging out the core engine, but right now it looks unlikely. I’ve been running into some frightening challenges – I’ll go into detail about my pain points in another blog post soon!
In the mean time, let me know what your favorite monsters are! I’m also always happy to look at new reference games.
Interesting concept art. Looks really good but guess I’ll have to see final products to completely judge. In terms of the monsters I like, in batch 2 I love 1 and 9. In batch 1 I like 3 and 31. Tower designs I’m unsure of. Love them all really and love the futuristic style but all seem too city like and not like cannons or anything that I can see shooting projectiles out of.
Dude! Those look nice. I can’t really decide on any as I like them all. The one concern or curiosity I had was with the towers though. I thought the idea was that they stack on top of each other and the monsters fall. That said maybe its a top down view and the towers are their own individual towers? Either way I love it.
P.S. I think you inspired me to start using my own blog btw. Good stuff and I like your formatting. Easy to read and feels like comfort reading vs lecture material.
The towers are still really early concept! The final towers will be much more suited to the gameplay style. I figure it will be interesting to see the progress of the towers from concept to completion.
Joey the towers are top down so they are all individual, not stacked on top of each other!
Awesome to hear you’ve started up your blog! Can’t wait to see what you post