The Moray Eel boss

This past week me and my team have been discussing the possible implementation of a boss in our game (SelFish). As of yet, it’s not final that we will have this boss in our finished product. However, we felt that it is important to include a designed concept with the core mechanics needed before the feature freeze coming up next week. So therefore, I’ve mainly been focusing on this boss this sprint.

The team decided on a moray eel as the boss enemy, partly because of the movement pattern it allows for. We want it to stay still on one side of the screen and attack from that same side, never revealing more than its head and a portion of its body. It also made sense to make the boss a moray in regards to the aesthetics of the aquarium, being a more reef inspired kind of environment. Furthermore, implementing our own boss character will make this game stand out from the others with the same concept. As a side effect bonus, the moray will be easier to animate than the originally intended boss of an octopus.

It was clear that everyone in our team knew the importance of the design aspect, that we would discuss the behavior and attacks of this enemy boss before going into the pure aesthetics. We also wanted to have it make sense in the story that this moray eel is attacking the player (Stephen). One idea that came to mind was that Stephen, in self-defense, is attacking the moray eels’ children (implemented as their own enemies of the main character) and thus making the mama/papa eel really angry.

When it came to visually designing this boss, I had a lot of freedom. After scrapping a few sketches that didn’t live up to expectations of visual appeal, I ended up with a sketch that I liked and felt was an accurate representation of the character.

In my previous blog post I mentioned line art as a weak point of mine, but have since then developed a technique that works for me when cleaning up the outlines of my artwork. I start with making a thicker line on a separate layer (in Photoshop) over the sketch and proceed with using the eraser to shave off the thickness and make the lines have the right weight to them. I then go back and forth with the brush (filling in the line where needed) and the eraser until I achieve the look I want. Using this technique is a quick method for decent looking line art.

After line art was done, I moved on to local colors. I chose a khaki green, darker hue that I felt represented the antagonist role of this character well. This color also stands out from the background but does not visually conflict with the player character Stephen (who is yellow).

Because I wanted some visual interest and not just a flat color, I added some textures in the shape of different values and hues. And although that made it look appealing, I wondered if this look could possible conflict with the rather simplistic look of the rest of our assets/characters in our game. So, I made a simpler version of it as well, for the team to be able to choose from.

As far as the shadows go, I simply added a form shadow signaling that the light is coming from above. Nothing fancy, no key lights. This is after all just a concept placeholder of a boss that may not end up in our game.

Over all, I’m pretty happy with the result and we now have our boss concept done with both design and aesthetics.