Today I completed the initial designs for the character, enemies, and flowers.

My process started when the group met and discussed what we wanted for the game. I made a Trello board and started writing down all the ideas presented in the meeting while considering the art for each one. We found that we favored a more garden-themed game but wanted to put a twist on it so we combined it with a robot idea we had earlier. From there we immediately discussing gameplay and art.

I wanted to keep the game with a friendlier and more cutesy style to complement the theme of gardening. When designing the player character, I stuck with clean rounded lines to convey the desired theme while also making the character pleasing for players. For the garden, the team decided to keep it robotic and have the flowers be made out of metal. We originally thought of having regular flowers with a metal color palette would be best until I suggested keeping a pastel color pallet and making the flowers/plants look like they are made out of nuts and bolts and/or other typical metal scraps. This would keep the game from being too grey and look feeling more like the happy garden the player can strive for.  However, we wanted the player to have some challenges so we decided to add enemies that would drop the necessary items to make the garden. This causes a break in the happy garden theme as the enemies should look dangerous. We decided to make them non-humanoid and I went with a darker grey and rust color pallet. I also made the enemies look more rigid with straight, sharp lines to keep it as a contrast to the player character.

Moodboard:

Character and Flower:

Enemy Robot:

Although I don't have images yet, I have already made plans on how my art assets can interact with the game mechanics. When making the garden, red outlines will be placed on the map to show the unmade garden elements and once the player collects the right items, they can head back over to the red area and press a key to place/craft that part of the garden.