Below are real, unedited sketches for characters in our game. The sketches were just enough to get an idea of what to create when I get into Photoshop and Pyxel.

Play Fleur Defense Now! https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/fleur-defense

For this jam I feel like we were all on the same page right from the get go. We were already eye-balling the “Garden” theme, perhaps under the influence of a recently popular farming game. I started out by creating our hero straight away.

It felt pretty good to get rolling on the game right away. Our team has a great deal of trust and we're able to allow each other to do what we're best at without getting hung up on details. We brainstormed a few things and got the ball rolling.

I made up our first defense plant next. I tried to make things that the developers would need as they went along, although sometimes its best to go with inspiration and come back to immediate needs. I like to sketch things at least three times usually, and I'll flip it over to double check proportions so it doesn't look weird (as I'm heavily right handed).

After getting some sleep on the first night (having worked at regular day at the ole 9 to 5) I started in on our first enemy bug. I thought of the bugs in Starship Troopers, so I put the movie on while I worked. This wasn't a great idea, probably a better idea to put on something super boring with not a lot of action. I'm not sure why I did, but I decided to imagine a 4 legged walking cycle for a bug, rather than just looking one up. Still came out ok.

The developers wanted another defensive plant, one that was melee or short ranged. Fortunately I had some axe & shield seeds!

Wait that's no axe! Well I decided that a plant, being more afraid of axes than swords, might just use one to defend itself. And the shape is a bit more like a leaf. I rounded out our plants with two growth stages to show their progression.

We wanted a smaller, faster bug and Tristan helped me out with some inspiration, finding a nice photo of an aphid. This time I wanted to do a 6 legged walk cycle. Conveniently I managed to do it with just 3 frames! Nice!

Its important to give yourself little challenges in a jam, it's a great way to learn! Tristan continued to help me out by finding more inspirational photos. We were on the hunt for our "mother" plant, as it was almost as important as our hero and I wanted to get it done before it was too late. We found some amazing photos of a Jade Vine plant, and I used it to make our mama plant.

The next big challenge was our environment. I made a foreground and background tile set that kinda looked like it could be in a plant nursery or greenhouse, with some lighter colored cement and medium raw woods and plenty of green. I threw in a greek meander for style points. Then the hardest of all, a way to represent that the game takes place inside a greenhouse.

I wanted to show a lovely background behind the glass and came up with this, kind of inspired by classic Mario and Kirby games. It was here that I started to break out Illustrator, its easier to come up with big shapes like this than starting out with pixel art.

Finally I concentrated on our title screen. This was the only thing that we honestly struggled with, right up to the final day. We couldn't decide on a name for our game! I played around with naming our hero, and looked at baby names that have something to do with flowers. I landed on Fleur, it seemed fitting. I played around with some titles with her name, even just "Fleur" as the title, finally coming to Fleur Defense and it stuck as it both described our hero and the mechanics of the game in a simple way. I did the title also in illustrator.

Our style well established by this point, I came up with a rolypoly bug to take out defense plants. Play testing at this point clued us in that we needed to give the player a reason to move around the map instead of staying put. We came up with lemon trees that need to be defended, so I came up with some animations for those. By then it was ready for release!

Thanks for checking out the art of Fleur Defense and playing our game!

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/fleur-defense