Work on The Adventures of Chris continues! Currently, I have a working demo containing:
- The complete introductory sequence
- The Kingdom of Lost Balloons
- Mexico (Jungle/Mayan Temple)
- Malaysia (Stilt Village)
- Transylvania (Count Junior’s Castle)
- Los Angeles (Freeway/Refinery)
Siberia is next on the agenda – and we’re already a ways toward completing the artwork! I’m especially looking forward to the boss of that level… should be a doozy. If you’re interested in play-testing the latest builds, feel free to contact me at [email protected] and I’ll shoot you the links!
The Los Angeles level is the newest completed, and may still need a little bit of tweaking difficulty-wise. But I do like Kyle’s new design for Smog Monster.
One of my favorite things to do when working on the game is to watch lead artist/animator Kyle rough out new character concepts. As someone with little artistic talent, it feels a lot like magic to me. Smog Monster has been a villain in my game since very early days, so I was excited to see him get a “real” design.
For some reason, as we were sitting down to sketch out Smog Monster, we gave him a baseball cap and a cigar. The idea that a monster made completely out of pollution would also smoke a cigar cracked me up. I also loved that the details immediately raised questions about this guy – is he a Dodgers fan? Why? Why does he smoke? Does he need to or just like to? Did he used to be human? What if he didn’t? What if LA smog just pulls for LA teams?
So Kyle did the rough animation above, and Smog Monster mostly looked like that for a while, until I realized that he needed a new personality in his dialog to match his new look. In the OUYA version of the game, Smog Monster was basically an excuse for dumb jokes that, unfortunately, never got laughs. He needed to be more than dumb. So I worked out a new character description for him.
As I was telling Kyle about the new direction for the character, he apparently got inspired to redesign his appearance to match the personality that I had changed to match his appearance! So he sent me a new sketch – this time with a huge, puffed-up chest and a facial expression to match his new role as the kingpin of Southern California emissions. So the final design was more a bit iterative than I originally intended.
I don’t know about you, but I like Smog Monster’s new shape and expression. I hope you’ll enjoy his new dialog and personality as well in the new Los Angeles level!
