Our world design stayed pretty true to early concept sketches, filled with abstract plants with whimsical textures and colors.

We went through a lot of character sketches before arriving at our final hero design.  He was almost a treant, a dryad or a mushroom!

Ultimately, we went with a young, nature boy character.  Here’s his concept sketch along with his final render.  Future plans may include the option to choose whether you play as him, a female character, or as one of the treants or mushrooms that didn’t make it into this version of the game.

We also sketched out a bunch of different enemies.  A lot of them were pollutants and parasites that would threaten the plant life you’re trying to spread.

In the end, we went with our little rock dudes, that we like to call ‘runkins’.  It’s not that we considered them the most interesting of the enemy designs, but under time constraints, they seemed like the most manageable.  The final game will include all sorts of antagonists, with all sorts of behaviors.

Our current character’s final geometry is 2370 triangles.  We decided to go with a low poly modeling approach because we wanted to play it safe and make sure that we weren’t going to over-tax the system with only one model in game. We saved polys by using poly planes with transparency to map the hair. Future improvements will include ambient maps to pop the character out more from the background and swappable clothing/accessories.