Art of Mount Ookie
Hi Everyone,
Our game Mount Ookie is about a young hero, helping a giant beast on its journey, by removing life sucking wasps from its body, and using them to feed it and remove obstacles from its way.
We wanted to share the art progress, from where we drew our inspirations, and how we made our creative decisions along the way.
The Art Style -
From the start, we knew we wanted to go with pixel art. Our art team consists of two people - Yakier Bunker, who worked mainly on the wasps, the hero character, and the animations, and Stav Goldstein, who worked mainly on the Ookie.
We chose pixel art because we both really love and enjoy it, have a lot of experience with it, and think it is a great style to use in a short jam. The reason is mainly because pixel art is in its nature a minimalistic style, which allows us to produce many diverse art assets in a relatively short time. It also requires simple animations with a low frame rate, and it allows a very smooth integration when different hands are working on the game, making the art style seem more consistent and cohesive.
The Ookie -
In the game, the giant creature is the level itself, and so it seemed natural to us that the beast would be some kind of ancient elemental creature, some kind of moving mountain. The creature also had to be relatable, because we wanted a feeling of a relationship between the hero and the beast.
So, when we started to think about the character design, the first game that came to our mind, as many of you have pointed out, was "Shadow of the Colossus", a game about a young hero, battling huge beings called colossi. So we collected a few screenshots from the game, relying on the colossi for the creature's face and build.
Our first draft of the level looked something like this:
And then it became something like this:
We wanted the creature to consist of many different platforms in different heights, which will force the player to jump from platform to platform, making the game feel more dynamic.
We struggled a lot with how the inner platforms should look. We wanted them to look like natural parts of the creature's body - like its legs, or shoulders, but it was complicated because, as a result of the game's mechanics, the platforms weren't supposed to move.
So we made a sketch where the platforms are static islands and mushrooms that grow on the creature's body, making him look more like a moving mountain, rather than a giant creature, but it looked good, and we were happy with it.
Later we had to add some platforms at the bottom of the creature, so that the players could jump nack up if they fell to the ground -
Ookie's Face -
The creature's face was especially difficult, because we wanted it to looked ancient and mythical, but still relatable. We made many drafts, and eventually came up with this sketch:
We liked it because it was relatable and kinda cute, and eventually became this:
As you can see, it is heavily inspired from "Shadow of the Colossus", especially the mask-like design, the thick eyebrows that also function as a platform and the stoic expression with the glowing, beady eyes.
Materials and Textures
Materials and Textures in pixel art are a huge and exciting world, and it was a great challenge to explore different kinds of styles, and finding the textures that will work together and fit the style of the game. So we collected more references and put it in a Pinterest board, and then experimented with different techniques in order to find the right ones.
The Hero
Our main goal when designing the hero was to compliment the Ookie. We decided to keep the hero relatively small on screen, while still making their proportion human, as far as size let us. By doing so we hoped to emphasize just how massive is the Ookie.
Only 20 pixels tall, we tried to dress the hero in a way that would further tell the story - we imagined a tribal person of a mishmash culture who is attuned to the magnificent walking mountain. We chose bright red as the main color so the hero would be clearly visible whether on the background of the Ookie or the panorama around it.
When we approached the animation we took into consideration their small size and the general time constraints, we tried to produce a strong silhouette for each drawing while keeping the number of drawings low.
The Wasps
The wasps went through a few iterations as we explored their shape, size and color. Similar to the hero, The wasps needed to easily pop out throughout the game.
Their flight cycle animation is quite simple yet effective: it is composed of 3 drawings, wings up, wings down and a frame with smeared wings that connects them and creates the illusion of fast motion.
However, the wasps slow down when they prepare to land so we made the digging in animation relatively rich. At 6 drawings, it's the most numerous frame by frame animation in the game and it makes the transition between the two main states (“flight” and “dug down”) smooth.
