Field Note #1: Concepting an enemy

The main design concept for the Technorats gang was the notion that they dismantled their enemies and took the best parts to augment themselves, thus making it seem like they were made from multiple different styles of parts.

I was given a lot of freedom in the visuals of the enemy bots but kept the main design concept in my head the whole time I was making the first sketches.

I started the whole process by sketching the strongest (tier 1) enemy robot, that was later changed to be the medium (tier 2) enemy. These first sketches were fast and messy done on a paper for me to get a feeling on how to draw robots normally, given that this was my first time drawing them, with and without the change in art style. After these were done and before I moved onto drawing in a computer with the pixel art style, I showed what concepts I had come up with and took those elements in them that were approved of and fit the games story/vision into account when working on the next concepts.

As this was supposed to be the strongest enemy at the time, I wanted to make sure its design reflected that, although the first 3 designs didn’t really show this, but the final one did.

The first pixel design followed quite closely one of my paper sketches, with it having a gun as a hand and the different style on each limb. All together this one still looked quite plain and simple.

Second design had different head and legs and broader shoulders than first.

Third design was more upper body heavy, and its limbs were visibly different, in this design I removed the gun hand that had been in the first two concepts and changed the head.

Fourth and final design differs the most from my previous ones that did look a lot alike, given that it takes a lot of influence from mechs in its design. Its limbs look different from each other, head has taken on a more box like appearance, I gave it a gun (uzi) and added some colored decoration in the Technorats gang colors.

Designing the weakest of the Technorats enemies was faster and easier prosses compared to the first robot that I drew. In the beginning of this robot’s design process there was an idea to make a base body for the robot and change some aspects of its design with different heads, arms, and legs to switch with.

Just like in the first robot I started by making some quick sketches on paper but didn’t make so many of them and moved on to drawing on computer.

The first pixel concept I drew of this robot didn’t have normal legs and it was quite small, but I abandoned this design very quickly.

Second concept did have normal legs, and arms. In this point I was thinking different ways to bring up the robot’s allegiances by incorporating the gangs color in addition of highlights on the robot itself on possible clothing that it could wear. I tried as a one possibility a vest that had yellow trimming in it.

Third and final concept shares a lot of its looks with the second one although with some minor changes. In this one I tried some different styles of highlighting the yellow color on this bot, and instead of the vest from the second one I made it into a harness.

While I was doing the enemy design, I was also studying and doing the necessary animations for them. All in all, this whole process from start to finish taught me a lot in how to make pixel art and how to design character for a 2D game.

- Milla, 2D Artist