Art Spotlight: Bosses

This week we wanted to talk about and show off some of the enemy bosses that you’ll encounter as you play through the Story and Free Play modes in the game.

In a game with so many upgrades and options, Art really wanted to run with the bosses. So we let them.

Our Art Director, Jason Sallenbach, thinks of the enemy bosses almost like the “towncenter” of the enemy (betraying some of our Age of Empires heritage there). Since you are always fighting the evil, tentacled Voltari, Jason wanted to give them a bit of uniqueness to help make each boss encounter more interesting.

Being that each boss is effectively the enemy mothership, the original boss station was made with the idea of it having a literal face to give it some more personality and evil flair than the player’s mothership.

After some iteration, we thought that worked out pretty well. Thus, with that bar set, the task became about getting good variation on each boss. We have the first three bosses done so far. Each has a distinct vibe and feels different while still being part of the overall enemy mothership ‘class’.

Our UI style is definitively 2D, so Jason had to translate each 3D boss into something that matched the look and carried the menacing vibes into each spot it shows up in the UI (which is quite a lot!).

As we move forward, we’re going to look at giving each boss some additional sub-faction coloring to differentiate them even more. And, obviously, this is just the looks of each boss. We are working on giving them each unique gameplay across all their boss stages.