Monsters in Suburbia Logo
Several months ago, I was approached by the developer/creator of Raylogic Games to work on an RPG with him. We traded a few e-mails about it, and then the project was set on the backburner. He was such a nice guy and I was thoroughly disappointed when nothing happened with the game. He was one of those “clients that got away” – the people who have that great vision and drive who would be fun to work with for one reason or another.
Low and behold, some time later an e-mail popped up in my inbox from him and everything was green lit to go!
Nothing says bonus like being able to design monsters! It’s scary when the creature presented is literally an amorphous blob – something that should have no shape but “blobby” and little distinguishing features. Technically, the “blob” was a protoplasm, which, after some research, had the potential to be more than jelly. I decided to make nuclei-like designs within the body that could function as “eyes” and internal organs – setting them up for heavy transparency so their innards could be visible to the world.
The biggest and possibly most important part of the project was an icon for the iPhone. A 57×57 pixel icon doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but it has to compete with hundreds of thousands of other icons and stand apart enough for someone to click it. Cartoons are easy to see, but the game was trying to steer away from being pegged as cute. Dark suburban streets don’t show up on something the size of a thumbnail and after tweaking with crisper vector graphics and more chromatic colors we’re happy with how it turned out!
The game’s developer wanted to utilize my illustration and graphic design skills and as you can imagine, there’s never a dull moment!
Monsters in Suburbia Icon
The premise is fun and creative freedom is definitely a plus. We may have just started, but some major coding happens this weekend, so be on the lookout for an awesome iPhone app from Raylogic!