Behind-the-scenes: Monster Design

I'm Sixtine, Art Director on Monsters are Coming!

First of all, thank you so much for the amazing response to our Character Design devblog! We're thrilled you enjoyed our second behind-the-scenes look at the game's development, so today we're back with another one.

This time, though, it's the monsters' turn to take the spotlight! They play a central role in every run, constantly forcing players to adapt their strategies and think on their feet.

With such a wide variety of creatures in the game, today we'd love to walk you through the inspiration behind their designs, how they evolved throughout development, and how they became the chaotic monsters you'll encounter in the current version of the game.

Designing the Monsters

In the very, very early stages of the game, the monsters were cute little creatures, mainly frogs.

As the game shifted from a cartoony vibe to a darker one, the cute, detailed creatures became less personified and a lot less friendly.

The art style now had to convey a single idea: the monsters are born of the darkness. Together, they create a shadowy mass relentlessly creeping toward the city and the player. The horde following the city is made from the same matter. In the game, the danger is associated with the color red; we chose to give the monsters red glowing eyes.

At first, the monsters were drawn and animated in 2D. We could create cool and varied creatures fairly quickly, but as time went on, the problems became gradually harder to ignore:

• The hitboxes were hard to understand and frustrating.

• Our game engine did not handle 2d and 3d lights the same way, which meant a heavy tech art challenge we didn’t want to tackle.

• The boss fights were a nightmare to handle, mixing 2D assets and 3D projectiles.

• We struggled with visual harmony between assets in different dimensions.

Steam post imageOne day, I created a crappy 3D spider from a sphere and 4 cubes, didn’t even bother with animation, put it in the game, and passed the controller to the rest of the team. Seeing the spiders slowly rotate to follow our character was the final nail in the coffin: we all agreed to switch to 3D.

Since they were now 3D objects, they needed silhouettes that worked well in every angle and were clearly visible at all times. When creating monsters, we had a specific workflow. The first step was blocking out shapes with a clear view of all angles, using the exact setup of the game’s camera. The red eyes had to be visible at any time to avoid the monsters blending in when standing in dark areas. The second step was cleaning up the model, rigging and skinning it. The polys were kept very low in number. Thirdly, the animation. It had to work with a huge amount of monsters, but still be expressive and cool-looking. We worked with 2D animated concepts for a while, and after several convincing monsters were produced, our 3D animator was able to work with a simple textual brief.

A new monster is born!

Adding new mechanics and biomes, we needed to broaden our panel of monsters. We had a clear guideline of keeping red eyes and dark masses, but we started adding touches of colors for specific gameplays. Orange/yellow became explosives, greys became armor, and so on.

As the game design introduced tiers of enemies, we used color and details to convey this progression in danger. Sometimes, the colorful part of the enemy would evolve to be more saturated, switching colors. Other times, the black part of the body would gradually become redder and redder. We also played a lot with shapes becoming more and more complex alongside the tier of the creature.

Steam post imageSteam post image

We didn’t have precise inspiration behind every monster. We loved the gooey creatures from Dome Keeper, the shadow heartless from Kingdom Hearts (specifically the demon tide), and, having them in mind, we created simple silhouettes that would fit our game.

As long as it is fun to slash through a huge pile of monsters, I’ll consider our mission a success!