Creating 2D art for a mobile game - The Life of Max

I’m thinking that most of you reading this will already know what ‘The Life of Max’ is if you follow me on social media! But for those of you that don’t, it’s a narratively driven mobile game all about the life of a very loveable dog; Max. I have the absolute pleasure of being the lead 2D artist on the project by Freesphere Entertainment. There is a lot that goes into designing for a game (and a lot I’m still learning about!), I’m just a small cog in a much bigger machine so I thought it would be fun to talk about what it’s like designing for a game from a 2D artists perspective!

So first things first, we had to come up with a design for Max!

Choosing a breed.

When it comes to designing any character, there are definitely a few things you need to decide upon before you can create something, in this instance, it was deciding on what breed max should be. Technically Max could have been any breed, but we had to think about what would appeal to the audience, especially a younger audience. We knew that Max was going to be a family dog, he would be medium sized and need to appeal to the player both visually and personality wise.

I pretty much had free rein to design whatever dog based character that I wanted, as long as it met those requirements. So I started off with some obvious ideas that might appeal to people visually in terms of what appeals to people in real life, so breeds such as Pugs, Labradors, Beagles and Dachshunds etc. But then we hit a dilemma, did we want the family to adopt Max or get him from a breeder? I’m not going to get into the whole breeder vs adoption debate, but we decided to go with adoption based on our own previous experiences, which changed it up completely from a design perspective, because he could now be whatever breed we wanted, he would be a mongrel.

I sketched out a fair few ideas, making sure to use reference because his design would still need to be rooted to a few breeds in some kind of way, in other words, he still needed to look like a dog! I started out by sketching dogs from reference, then swapping different parts around from different sketches such as the ears, nose, eyes and fur type. After a fair few exploration sheets, we finally landed on an idea.

Making sure Max was cute!

Thankfully the idea for the style of Max and my current style were already pretty close and something the other guys at Freesphere Entertainment gave as reasons as to why they wanted me on board for the project in the first place, always a bonus! However, I still needed to make sure his shape, colours and overall aesthetic were what we had in our heads.

We wanted to get the ball rolling on the project, so I didn’t want to spend too long on his general body shape as I already had a good idea of what I wanted him to look like, the main reference that obviously popped into my head was the film ‘The Secret Life of Pets’ and although I love the film and the character designs, I personally didn’t think it would work well if our Max was that stylised, I imagined him being slightly bouncy looking with chunky paws, but overall a general dog shape. With this in mind and Max’s facial design already in place, I played around with a few ideas and eventually ended up with, what I hope you also think is an adorable dog!

He also needed to have an engaging personality, one that people with dog’s would be able to relate to. I sketched up a lot of facial expressions which helped to get that idea across a lot more. We have and still are using our experiences with our own dogs as inspiration. So I don’t want to spoil that too much, but here’s a few shot’s from the early development of the game, I’m sure any dog owner can relate to at least one of these!

Max’s in-game functionality.

There are lots of different ways that games can be played, and lots of different ways that they can look eg. pixel art, 3D models etc. So even though Max looked all cute, it was important that he would then work in game. For example, if The Life of Max was going to be a pixel game, I would need to provide a sheet of sprites, if it was going to be a 3D game, I’d need to provide a 3D modeller/artist which a character design sheet for Max so they could build him out in 3D.

Fortunately we already knew our game was going to be more like an interactive story book, but this is definitely something you need to consider upfront when you’re designing for a game. Just because a character looks amazing as an illustration doesn’t mean it would transfer well into a 3D model etc. The most important part of Max’s in-game functionality was that he would need to stand out from any background (as would any interactable object) and he would also need to be fairly easy to draw, because I would be drawing him over and over for different scenes and animation sequences. So as you can see, his coat is nice and smooth, he’s made up of pretty simple shapes and his patterning is pretty straightforward, it’s in places that are easy to colour and varied enough to make him look unique.

I hope that this all made sense! I’m going to be covering more elements of creating art for the game from a 2D artists perspective over the next couple of months!

I’ve also been streaming on Twitch on a daily basis, where I sometimes work on The Life of Max. Feel free to follow me on Twitch if you want something to chill to while you work or if you’re interested in seeing the process behind what I do! I am away next week but I will have a proper streaming schedule when I’m back, and a better mic!

Thanks for reading guys!