This was a very fun project designing the gameplay and sprites for an iPhone game development company. The colors and graphics actually come out very crisp on the iPhone’s 160 dpi screen. The theme was cute, cute and more cute.
First thing I did was the main character’s design. I decided on a bunny since they have proven to be cute and hardcore in many games over the years. I started the design in Adobe Illustrator, then imported it into Adobe Flash for animating the sprite action sequences. I could have done it complete in Illustrator but it was easier to preview the animation in Flash. Thankfully I had training in character animation, it really helped for this project.
Next was building of the environment elements. I stayed with basic and universally recognizable shapes, to make it appealing to a wide audience. Since iPhone has a global reach, it made sense not to use something that is geographically exclusive.
The design of the background tiles was actually more difficult than expected, because they had to be exciting yet not overwhelm the already colorful objects in the foreground. And since the visual design of the game was flat 2D, I couldn’t use any visual depth techniques such as heavy shadows or depth shading. A lot of time was spend tweaking the various colors till all the background tiles matched all possible combinations of foreground objects.
The control buttons had to be designed so that they do not cause your fingers to block too much of the screen. That is actually a consistent design problem for many iPhone games, every time your finger has to cross the screen it’s generally bad.
I think I ended up drawing close to 200 pngs for this game, can’t wait to do more again.
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