Bacon and Games

I had a chat recently with Ajay Karat about building games inspired BY art, rather than designing a game and then dressing it up with art. He sent me a bunch of his concept art to dig through and this is the one that stood out to me. (Not sure what that says about me…)

I could really imagine those dudes bouncing around in a game and, much like Happy Tree Friends, I kept thinking how much fun it’d be to kill something so darn cute. The concept I landed on takes place in a classic arcade format where the animals drop in from the top and bounce their way to the bottom. Your goal is to sort them into the 4 different openings at the bottom of the screen.

Get them in the right bin, horray! Get them in the wrong bin and… well let’s just say the sorters don’t take kindly to receiving the wrong fuzzy animal. The 5th gap, at the bottom center, will eventually be fire or lava or something equally nasty though the level isn’t close to being designed yet.

You can’t control the animals directly, rather there are different “gadgets” spread around the level that you can click on to modify the paths of the animals. Right now all I’ve got is conveyor belts, trap doors, warp tunnels and springboards but I have many more in store for this game. Anyway, not bad for a Friday’s work. I’m excited to see where this one goes. I meant for my boxy, pixelated versions of Ajay’s characters to be placeholder but I’ve kinda fallen in love with them :)

Here’s the first sketch…