The character evolution in Shop Crush
At the beginning, the game had a different tone and was more of an ironic/comic game. Therefore, we wanted the characters to be cartoonish and caricatured. They were supposed to be a reflection of the game mechanics they represented.
This is the first iteration of the game. Character was simple and didn't have any backgroundord shading.
The Second Iteration
I was doing a redesign of the game the other day. The goal was to improve the readability of the game rules, so I changed the appearance of the character, too. Since the character background became wide, I painted them a background myself, with what I had at my disposal.
The second iteration of the game design. Characters are now wider and more readable. This appearance allowed for characters' emotions and speech bubbles, too.
The Big Leap
However, during the playtests on different conventions, I still saw a big interest among players in the character personas themselves, rather than stats or gameplay cards. So I decided to add a special menu with a character, where we can see them as humans.
It has their age, tastes, character, and other attributes, which familiarize them with players, and players greatly enjoyed it.
But this representation now required much more detailed backgrounds for the character then pefore.
So I asked one of our artists to paint backgrounds for every character. In our game, a character can be in 3 skins also - male, female and alien. So he painted backgrounds for all 3 skins, too.
The backgrounds became much more detailed. They were supposed to highlight the character better.
But that wasn't enough.
See, I also asked our other artist to paint a new Steam picture for the game. She painted it, and it has become our key art for the foreseeable future. I really enjoyed how she did that. Though this time I had to do these weird concessions to the algorithm, like screaming faces and weird colors, but it worked greatly, and I am satisfied.
However, players were starting to notice the difference between the characters on the promo image and in the game. Even though every character had a unique background, it wasn't enough. Characters appeared flat and cartoony compared to this new iteration of the game art.
So I asked our character artist to update the characters, too.
Here you can see the progress of the work. We had upgraded every character in the game. What has noticeably changed:
lighting
shadows
sometimes, character design altogether
faces
You can compare how it was before:
And how it is now:
Conclusion
We are so happy we did this. And I can't wait to share with you in one of the next posts the info on all the characters. Our character artist she had done an amazing job, and we really hope you will like the updated characters even more!