HDW - Circus Escape

Skills improved

Photoshop
Digital drawing & sketching
Creating style guides

Character Design
Colours & schemes
Scene & layer composition

Creating tileable assets (parallax scrolling)
Animation using sprite sheets

Improving art skills & composition

Starting from no experience in drawing and artistic workflow processes, this project was to introduce me into digital 2D art for games. I was to learn digital drawing on drawing tablets, colour & shape consistency, scene composition with multi-layer parallax, and more.
I'd also be designing a character using horizontal/vertical iteration, and animating it with a run and jump animation using a sprite sheet.

Forming the Idea & Theme

To start off, I was given a simple 2D sidescroller game, with placeholder art assets. The goal: Replace the assets with my own creations, fitting a chosen theme and idea.
Finding inspiration by browsing through images, I decided to combine human with nature: A circus theme in a mountain nature setting. I'd keep interactable objects circus themed, and nature theme for all other assets. I'd have the "enemy" be a firework, a mask as a pick-up and a cone-plinth as obstacle.

With the theme set, I still had to find a fitting character. A clown, or any other circus artist, felt rather dull and I couldn't make it feel original.
I decided it would be a good idea to dilute the human-theme a bit, and go for a rock-golem dressed up as a jester as character.
This is where the 'Circus Escape' idea came from: A captive rock-golem answering nature's call home.

Reference board

Reference was easily found, circuses and nature plenty on the web. The jester was bit more down to imagination, as most accurate references are old paintings.

Creating the assets & scene composition

To create the scene layer composition, I started by creating some quick thumbnails to try out different plausible compositions. Choosing 1 of these, I drew up some variations of scene-objects and picked the more fitting ones to redraw and spread in the scene.
I used 2 colour-schemes: One for the circus assets, and another for the nature elements. The circus tent was a simple outline filled with a stripe pattern. I sketched up a mock-up of how the scene should look like to ease the creation of each scene layer.

The game's framework was set up to use a 5-layer parallax. For the background I simply used a gradient and added a sun to it. The layer in front of that became the mountains with a waterfall and some trees in front. The middle layer consisted of the circus tent and some larger trees.
The foreground layer was made up of tileable floor, water pond, and interactable object spawns. The layer behind the foreground layer resembles an earth-bank, to give the road/river a dug-in look.

The character

I came up with the character by sketching and applying vertical/horizontal iteration to it. Shape language is iterated vertical, silhouette and features is iterated horizontal.
I chose what I liked most, and made a final outline for it. The jester hat was quickly drawn up with a few quick sketches of it. All that remained was to pick a colour for its 'rock' look, and choosing the circus colours to be painted on it.
In order to have it animated, I had built up the character's layers in such way I could easily alter the body parts to create a 12-frame sprite sheet animation.

Reflecting

Looking back, the project was relatively good for a beginner. However, I failed at creating proper style consistency. The floor rocks don't match with the scene rocks, and overall the interactable objects stick out like a sore thumb.

Circus Escape Designing 2D game art assets