PROCESS
The project marks my first real foray into working in Illustrator. The freedom to truly construct an image from individual elements rather than designing and executing a fully realized composition was a wholly new way of working that I enjoyed a lot. I embraced the flatness of the program and let this dictate the aesthetic of the game. To me the layering of shapes created a sense that each piece was slapped onto the screen. I ran with this idea and decided to evoke an interactive sticker book using forms with rounded edges, lively colors, and outlines to let the figures pop off the backgrounds.
I got rather excited about the creation of the jungle and didn't consider that this was meant to be a background when selecting my first color palette. I decided to limit each background to two hues to retain the original version's charm and complexity but help them recede behind the figures.
It was a new challenge to design a character that reads as a singular form for a small screen. My original digital attempts were far too piecemeal and line-heavy to work at this scale. I relied more heavily on shape in later versions while retaining the playfulness of the originals. The evolution of the helicopter shows the shift in my understanding of designing for this format.
The full line-up of characters in their offensive and defensive modes. My favorite is the fed-up turtle.
