Concept art v.s. finished game - Behind the Scenes of Dubious Mushrooms (LD49)
Introduction
This Ludum Dare was the first one for me and for most of my team "Dubious Potions". While we where competing in the Jam, we decided to try and follow the Comp-rules and timeline (the latter was mostly on account of real life availability: We have day-jobs after all).
After one of the most fun and exhausting weekends of my life we managed to produce something fairly close to the vision we mind-melded together, that first hour of the game-jam.
I was mainly responsible for the illustrations and 2D pixel art in the game, as well as the character concept.
Having gotten some time to recuperate after the jam-weekend I thought it might be fun to showcase some of the concepts for the gameplay and art I made during the first hours of the Jam and compare them to the final assets.
If you want to try it yourself, our LD49 submission is here: Dubious Mushrooms
The Concept art and what came of it
This is the first design sketch we drew. As you might be able to see we spit-balled a couple of names, but landed on something that tied it together with the name of our little dev-group. You can also see some of the conceptual mechanics we thought about adding, but we learnt quite fast to work towards a MVP that worked, rather than aiming too wide. Kill your darlings and so forth. Note also if you look in the top left of the sketch, that the vision for the start-screen kept it's general appearance from sketch to final submission. More on that below.
Our team came from quite a wide array of different backgrounds so we decided early to try and make the game in such a way that everyone could contribute in the way they where most comfortable with. Sanna, our super talented 3D modeller/level designer made all the 3D assets used in the game. To communicate the feel of the background we worked from this concept:
In an early version the platform was actually square, but we decided that making it round made for a more pleasurable aesthetic. Here is something close to the final version. The concept really helped define the lighting colour especially:
The full game idea of Dubious mushrooms was that the planting and harvesting would be done by a player character who would then deliver the goods to a central hopper. This never made it to the MVP, but it did make it into the general narrative around the game - "MushCap" as we called her is visible in the main menu and all of the end-state screens. And as a last minute addition before submission, we used the hopper and pixel sprite assets to lend more narrative to the game as you can se MushCap hovering in her bucket over the precarious platform of mushrooms when playing.
Here are the first concepts of MushCap. While I wanted to incorporate the mushroom theme, it was very hard to avoid threading on Nintendo-IP's when making a cute character in a mushroom hat. This is actually what informed my decision to make the hat into a more notably practical caving-helmet where the implied mushroom spots all are functional details such as lights and clasps.
The sketches could be used directly to produce the final illustrations (see the menu below) and I also made a pixel player-sprite and actually a voxel one as well during a pretty late code-solving-session. Only the front facing pixel-sprite ended up used due the time constraints of the Jam:
In a game about planting mushrooms you need to have some variety! I ended up pixling 9 different mushrooms in 8 states per mushroom during the jam and our teams musician, Elli, pixeled one of them (the prettiest one, the red-cap). I'm pretty fresh to pixel-art, but I can highly recommend to first sketch what you are going to pixel - It helped me out a lot and you can see that almost all sketched mushrooms ended up in the game, though I did cut the more violent-themed ones as they felt miss-matched to the general feel of the game in my opinion:
We had a lot of fun brainstorming these and many of them are quite "meem"-y.
And here are the roster of finished mushrooms:
Lastly in this post I just wanted to show the process for the menu. As you saw in the first sketch I already had a basic idea on how the menu could look so I sketched out a text-logo for the game and made a mock-up together with the sketch illustrations shown earlier in the post:
This then translated to the final menu screen, you can see a cropped version of it without buttons in the beginning of this post.
Having some success with my first sketch, the other sketches of Mushcap where then used in the making of the end-state screens for failing or winning:
I hope this post was as fun for you to read as it was for me to make!
For more of my creative endeavours, feel free to check out my instagram as well: Mascolls
And again, if you have the time, trying out and rating our game would be very appreciated:
You can see in our design board, that early game design contained plans to implement tardigrades you could find to increase tool efficiency in an upgrade mechanic, but was cut for LD scope.
The cat scanner was a quite early idea, but really came alive through Myzors concepts
