★Indie games by Greg Lobanov & friends★
This Beastie family was requested by a couple readers, partly because many picked up on the fact that this one has a storied history. It’s one of a few that was started early on in the concept development process and then never could quite get figured out until nearly two years of iterations later. Why was it so hard, and why did it take so long? I’ll try to show you that process and some of the tough lessons we learned along the way.
The seal was one of our earliest design prompts I came up with. All I really wanted to go on was a seal’s famous ball-handling ability; I thought they’d make for a great passing/setter-type character. With that prompt, Iris put forward a broad range of possible personas, all of which were appealing right away. But after taking some time to stew on it, we decided to go forward on the beach volleyball-bro character, because they felt like something quintessentially Beastieball which you wouldn’t ever see explored in other creature games (another important direction we were still trying to establish with our early designs).
This is probably a great time to mention that Irischroma loves pompadours. I don’t know why, I don’t think there may even be a particular reason. But left to their own devices, Irischroma would often introduce a pompadour somewhere in designs they played with, sometimes even accidentally. And that is what came through here in their development of the beach bro seal, including a first sketch idea for an immature form based on them. Looking at the adult’s sheet, I couldn’t find anything wrong with the designs, and in fact I was really excited by the strong personality already coming across, so I felt that it was basically finished and ready for animation. These are the sketches we used in beta builds for years. But while Alexis loved the personality and poses, she had doubts about the design, so we paused further work on its concept. After a while, feeling like we needed to make some progress on it somehow, we decided to explore more ideas for the immature stage.
There were lots of great sketches here, but there wasn’t any consensus among us which were the strongest ideas. While we struggled to figure out what we were missing, it was Alexis (as usual) who pointed out the lack of any clear theme to all the sketches done so far.
This is a type of issue that often comes up in these articles, but frequently readers respond with mild confusion, saying something along the lines “I liked the earlier design better, I wish you stuck with that one.” So I might take this as a moment to talk about why it’s always so important to establish a clear design theme, and why we often iterate past the point where a design is basically working, from the perspective of somebody who only learned its value in the process of making this game.
Firstly, sketch drawings have a rawness which conveys strong personality/gesture at the expense of clarity, cleanliness and specificity. It’s easy (and common among artists) to get attached to a compelling sketch drawing, only to feel the final cleaned-up result is disappointing. A compelling character design can’t work only as a sketch; it has to be strong enough that it has appeal and personality even when drawn in different poses, different angles, and by different artists. Put another way, if the concept’s appeal relies on the personality of the sketches, then that magic would be easily lost as soon as we cleaned it up and had a different artist animate it. Having a clear theme grounding the design’s details ensures that its essential meaning and character carries through to future stages of production.
Secondly, greater specificity always makes designs better. You might say, “but I liked it better in the earlier stage, so how can you say it’s better?”… well, because part of our goal is to make designs that most people don’t like. That might sound completely insane, but stick with me here. When designs are more generic, they have fewer potential “turn-off” elements, and tend to be more liked by more people. But if the entire game was filled with medium-temperature designs with minimal specific details, basically just animals with personalities, then the end result would be a game that nobody could really get excited about. Designs always need to have a weird element, something that drives some people away and attracts others. With 100+ Beasties in the game, we can afford to have 95 that you don’t even like, if it means that there’s 5 that feel specifically made for you. That’s the goal. And a well-established theme gives artists a blueprint they can follow to inject more details and visual ideas into a design to add that needed personality and weirdness.
Newly enlightened with this incredible wisdom, we asked Iris to do another pass but highlighting a “lifeguard” theme, to tie in the beach-bro persona they’d developed. The resulting sketches… felt like a step backwards. It felt like we’d glued some non-sequitur floatie shapes on the design; there wasn’t any clear harmony to it. We started spitballing other theme ideas. Maybe the big one is a surfboard, and the immature form is a boogie board?… But we had no idea how to convey that visually. We were very stuck.
This was where I had an idea that, at the time, seemed fairly ridiculous. The chest hair and pompadour were the key elements of Iris’ initial seal sketches, but they had nothing to do with the “Beach bro” theme, and it made any attempt to make them more “beach bro” just feel tacked-on and stupid. So why not make the hair the theme? Maybe the adult seal was very careful about their hair care, and their flippers produced hair wax to keep it smooth and shapely, while also making a smooth surfboard-like surface to glide along the beach. Riffing on that, the immature form can’t produce its own wax, so it would be an untamed hairball monster. Alexis was lukewarm on the idea, but Iris was all-in and went ahead exploring new ideas for the immature form.
These drawings were all incredibly cute, although none quite felt hairy and untamed enough. They were effective fusions of the untamed idea with a general shape of a seal, but Alexis was itching to explore what it would be like to make a design whose entire shape was untamed.
Alexis watched a LOT of videos of baby sea lions, and grew particularly attached to their huge floppy feet, awkward locomotion and hilarious vocalizations. She wanted to capture their particular weirdness while wrapping them up in a thick mass of hair, and the result was what was finally recognizable as Leobro.
It was finally time to solve the mystery of Broslidon, the hairwax seal. Alexis tried honing the design in to focus on the hair, looking for ways to make all of the key features happen in the hair without drawing attention away from it. Irischroma had the idea that the wax produced in their hand might vary in color from seal to seal, tinting the color of their hair; this was an exciting idea which helped Alexis to land on “G” which finally felt like we were in the ballpark of a finished concept.
Iris ran with this, playing with more hair shapes and color ideas, iterating on what Alexis had started. This was where we nailed down specific details like the size and shape of the hands, the patterning in the hair, the design of the tail, etc. We worked out that using the wax color as a hair highlight/streak felt strongest way to showcase that detail. The largest struggle remaining was trying to nail the texture of the hair, which had to look like hair, but also unnaturally smooth and shiny, all without compromising the level of detail established by our art direction.
In some ways, it’s embarrassing to have spent such a long time on these designs only to end up with something that feels so close to where we started. But it’s all the details that really matter, and sometimes they take a long time to nail down. Most people who play the game will never really be able to know or recognize the amount of thought and effort that goes into each of our Beastie concepts, especially for how many there are in the game. But I do believe the effort pays off.