Shell Shock

Student game at The Game Assembly (2019)
Download for free at itch.io

Our second project was a shoot 'em up where the team decided to go for a cartoony and playful style. During production we all fell in love with the characters and world we created and ended up creating lots of lore and silly extras (we even created parading angel versions of all the enemies for the end credits).

The joy of exploring new ideas in an inspiring environment is really one of the best feelings there is!

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My contributions: Player concept, Environment graphics, Music, Main menu, Logotype, Story, Website design.

Player concept

When the theme of the game was set ("Cartoony Ocean"), we needed to come up with a player design. Nothing obvious came to mind during our meetings, so in order to kickstart the brainstorming, all of the artists and animators in the team sat down separately for 10 intense minutes with the purpose of getting as many quick ideas as possible out on paper. I came up with the idea of a fish inside a mech glove, which would both enable us to have a cute protagonist and shoot powerful weapons. The other team members liked the idea, so we started to iterate on the design and decided to go with a hermit crab named McCahan as our laser-blasting protagonist.

First concept: Robert Pettersson
Mockup refinement: Jakob Svensson
Iteration: Fredrik Ämting
Final sprite: Kevin Lundmark

When the player concept was set, we needed to come up with some way of visualising the different weapons the player would use. Since the mech glove was such a big part of the player it seemed only natural to use that as a starting point. Making the hand hold different weapons seemed problematic (we didn't want the player to be too big or change size depending on weapon selected) and a bit boring, to be honest. Instead we decided to go with a "rock, paper, scissors"-inspired system, which in turn would give the animators a good oppurtunity to make the player more expressive through the different hand gestures.

Environments

I started early on to make some tests to figure out how many layers of parallax we needed to make the levels feel alive. Once that was prototyped and worked out with the programmers, the actual designing of the environment art could begin. We divided the levels between all three artists and I got responsibility over the bright and open coral reefs of Level 1. We borrowed assets back and forth in order to make all levels feel cohesive. In these screens you can see rocks, starfish and shells that were borrowed from the caves in Level 2 (made by Fredrik Ämting).