Pre-Production

Designing Cocozee

The first monster and the most important one to design was the nature monster that you would start and play the game as if you had picked it beforehand. The starting monsters have to be appealing in a cute way as they are meant to represent a younger maturity of their monster race but also appear to have potential as they will eventually grow.

Middle stages of maturing (also referred to as evolution in most games) have been cut entirely from this game for a few reasons. The first one is that they are simply unmemorable, a lot of the time they are awkward and forgotten due to them not going for cute or cool, more of a balance of both. But more importantly, maturing works a lot differently in this game due to a lack of any level system, rather you have to complete a certain task/s explained to you by a special NPC. I have also implemented narrative elements into this maturing system, having a thought out reason on how this strange method of progression makes sense.

Moving on from that design choice and back to the starting nature monster, I had a clear idea of what I wanted to create. My first idea was a coconut monkey, having both themes relating closely to tropical areas made sure that this monster would fit nicely into the environment. I tried to come up with some other ideas, some other tropical animals came to mind but for the most part I was already settled on the first idea I had come up with. When looking for references, I obviously chose to look at a lot of Pokemon monkeys and a few from other monster collection games as well, along with pictures of coconuts.

The references above gave me lots of ideas on how this character could look. One thing I noticed was that there was a lack of round/plump looking monkey monsters within these games, a lot were slim and agile looking. This gave me the idea to use the round, coconut theme to really make this character's appearance unique by making it round and coconut shaped. This idea expanded into making monkey be inside the coconut, this should give the character a cute appearance due to the coconut suggesting that the monkey is small and displays a tropical theme in a simple and tidy way.

Now that I had a clear idea of what I was envisioning, I started using the references' designs to start drawing how the monkey character will look. I used coconut references to design how the coconut part of the body will look but added a frilly part of the inside coconut that I believe I've seen somewhere before but can't think of where to add an extra colour to the design. The character will have a nature element and so I chose to make the fur coloured a tropical green. I struggled on how this monkey will be inside the coconut, at first I thought a neck and large head would poke out the top of the open portion of the coconut but having so much space to look into the coconut seemed off to me and so my next idea was to make the monkey itself the same shape as the coconut, very round. A good reference for how this monkey's body would look without the coconut is the mouse themed Pokemon, Marill (reference #1).

The finished design of the character that I have named Cocozee features a lot of inspiration from the references above. I especially used the Pokemon Chimchar (reference #2) to understand what basic features a monkey themed monster should have as well as how to balance a starting monster design's cuteness as well as it's potential.

One problem I do see with the final design that I have made is that the frilly part of the coconut may look more like some form of facial hair to some people. Luckily this is only a problem with the concept art's perspective and a lack of 3D viewing and so this shouldn't be a problem in-game.

Designing Palmzee

The next stage in maturity of your first monster and a base for the grandma character's appearance, your Cocozee character growing up into a Palmzee will be a clear indication that you have successfully completed the tutorial of the game. Because of this, I must make sure that it looks clearly more mature than Cocozee and demonstrates the potential that Cocozee's design showed.

When looking for references for this design I had a similar reference gathering process to Cocozee, I looked at monkey related monsters in other monster collection games but this time I looked for more mature stages rather than the more childlike forms of monsters. Then I also got some tropical themed images, this time of palm trees as Palmzee is clearly inspired by palm trees rather than simply coconuts, to help emphasize the idea of it being a mature stage of Cocozee.

While I already had a general idea of what I wanted this character to look like, I still got a lot of new ideas from these references. I wanted this design to loosely resemble the proportions of a palm tree, tall and thin. This means that I tried to gather some references of monkey characters that fit that body type that I'm looking for. I will also use the palm tree references to help with this obviously, one idea being that I want to give Palmzee a hairstyle made up of palm leaves to resemble the top of the tree.

When drawing Palmzee I used the tall/thin monkey references such as the monster Infernape (reference #1) to create a body that would stand tall, similar to a palm tree. When making the monkey pattern on Palmzee's chest I took inspiration from another monster, Rillaboom (reference #2) because I liked the sort of leaf pattern as circled on it's chest. For the face I just used simple monkey facial features commonly used in stylized work. Finally, when making Palmzee's palm leaf hair I made sure to use real life palm trees as clear inspiration when designing the head, this is the most important part of the design as it's the most unique part of the character and immediately draws your eyes to it.

The (not quite) finished design of the character that I have named Palmzee has a lot of cool features such as palm tree proportions, palm leaf hair and even grows coconuts. However, when showing this to my friend in order to get some feedback on the design he pointed out a few problems.

The biggest problem was that the design was far too simplistic for a cool, matured stage of Cocozee. If you remove the head features the design is pretty much just a green monkey.

My friend gave me a quick sketch of some suggestions on how the design could be made to look better and less simplistic.

My friend added a few features to make the design more interesting. He added limb accessories, a torso/waist accessory, ruffled fur and a coconut tail.

Before working on the redesign, I made a form to get feedback on previous designs as well as what parts should be added to Palmzee from my friend's sketch.

Cocozee was approved by the feedback and so that design is final but people obviously were less enthusiastic about Palmzee's simple monkey design. I requested that people choose which parts of my friend's quick sketch should be added to the final redesign of Palmzee. The most popular choices were the torso/waist accessory and ruffled fur and the least popular were the limb accessories and the coconut tail.

MY FRIEND'S SKETCH

Now with feedback, I can effectively create a redesign for this character. First I added the popular redesign choices, being the ruffled fur and torso/waist accessory. I chose to make this accessory vine-like rather than the leather material that my friend used as it felt more natural with the design's theme.

Limb accessories were left out entirely, being an unpopular option but for the tail I still needed to make some sort of tail because it's a monkey of course. With the coconut idea my friend suggesting being an unpopular choice, I thought about why it was unpopular and came to the conclusion that it seems rather pointless other than maybe being a weapon of some kind.

So with that, I thought of how monkey's commonly use tails, being climbing/swinging. I then thought of how media usually portrays vines as a tool for climbing within tropical environments and settled on the idea of making Palmzee's tail similar to a vine, both being thematically accurate and being functional as a useful part of Palmzee's body.

FINAL DESIGN

I made a second form to get feedback on the new redesign and it got much better feedback than the original design, as well as most people being happy with the vine-like tail instead of the coconut tail.

Trello Planning

In previous units, Trello has been helpful for me in organizing what has and hasn't been done. For this project I have done the same thing to help me understand what I have to do and visually shows me progress that I've made.

A lot of the modelling tasks are missing as I will need to finish the layout before I fully know what needs to be modelled, but it would generally be natural things such as trees and rocks. I was going to create a separate list for animations but since there are only a couple I have just grouped them in with the gameplay. For gameplay I only have a couple main mechanics to make, as well as a menu screen in which you will pick which monster you would like to start the game as.

Tutorial Story

Before planning what will be in this tutorial and what it's events are, it's important that I understand what narrative I will be trying to tell through the tutorial. Some key things I need to figure out are:

Why are you there? (You have been living with your grandma your whole childhood, missing parents are left as a complete mystery for the most part)
Why do you need to do what the mentor character is asking of you? (An invasive species are ruining the natural environment and your grandma believes that you are ready to start helping with these kind of issues as long as you learn to harness your special ability, Soulsharing)

With those questions figured out, I now have a general idea of what criteria the story needs to be and so here is what I have written for the tutorial, it'll be missing certain details such as names but the general idea is there:

You've started the game as Cocozee and begin the game with your grandmother complaining out loud about how the invasive species of rodent-like monsters have once again destroyed much of the environment around her home. She realizes that she is getting too old to deal with this sort of issue and suggests that you are ready to help.

She explains that you were born with an incredible ability, the ability to Soulshare. She points to an arcane marking on the back of your head. You are no ordinary monster, you are a Soulmon and that means that regular monsters have the ability to share a small portion of their soul with you, allowing you to transform into that species of monster at will.

Your grandmother explains that despite being far too pathetic in your base form to scare any of the rodents off, you may be able to convince a more fearsome monster to share part of it's soul with you, allowing you to transform into that species of monster and scare the snakes away from the environment. She then sets you off to go looking for a fearsome monster that you may Soulshare with.

After some searching you should find some form of monster that'd usually scare off the rodents, meaning that they would fear this particular type of monster. You wake it up with a sound ability and is luckily friendly enough to share part of it's soul with you. (You return to the grandma and this would usually be the part in which she would teach you how to transform etc but returning to the grandma will actually be the ending of the portion that I will create in order to not lean too much into mechanics.)

Tutorial Events

With the story figured out, I can now plan how this tutorial will play out. The goal of this first portion of the tutorial is to teach the player what the game is about and how your journey will begin. The game is about exploration and so you are left to go exploring and searching straight from the beginning to find a new monster in order to progress the tutorial. The brief narrative about the invasive species causing some deforestation issues gives the player a plausible reason as to why they must listen to the mentor character.

Non-visual storyboard of events:

Mentor character gives the player context on why they are there, what to do and why they need to follow what the mentor character says.
You're given a goal to explore and find a monster.
You return to the grandma which allows you to progress the tutorial.

Level Layout

Before making a layout for the level I wanted to do some research into both tutorial layouts and open world level layouts. This will hopefully allow me to make a friendly environment for new players while still encouraging exploration within the level. Creating this balance may be a challenge because tutorial levels generally use linearity to make the player feel safe and so my level needs to use other methods to create a safe space

The layout I've created isn't fully accurate to how the level will be with size etc and the rough walls would be smoother in-game. The starting location (grandma's house) is located directly in the middle of the level. I've made sure the monster's direction is behind the house as that is most likely not going to be the first direction you go, with the other three directions being much more clearly in your path. This game will be top down and so you wont be able to look what is in each direction ahead of time, encouraging the exploration aspect.

The small rock is the location that your grandma will be sitting and the lined walls represent climbable ones which is something you get access to after the tutorial through having Cocozee mature into Palmzee.

My plan to create an small level that still encourages exploration will be making sure the starting point is in the centre of the level. I will also make the level a four-pointed star sort of shape in order to minimize the level into four key directions that you can explore. Two of these directions will have interesting narrative elements to discover, such as deforestation caused by the invasive monsters. One direction will obviously lead to your goal, being the monster. The final direction will be the exit point of the tutorial, leading to a climbable wall which would only be climbable through your monster's matured state.

The plan for how I'm going to make this feel like a safe environment despite being thrown into a level with multiple directions is through the calming tropical environment that suggests no danger, with the exception of the deforested parts. These deforested directions will be quieter and eerier than the forested majority of the level, directly contrasting with the calm parts and you may even avoid the deforested areas in fear of encountering something dangerous despite there being nothing at all, brave players could be rewarded with more narrative elements.

Creating a Mentor Character

Unlike the other character's I've designed, the grandmother character needs a well thought through personality and backstory. As the tutorial mentor of the game, your grandmother needs to make the first level feel like a safe space and appear wise through her personality. Once I finish creating a personality for this character I will give them a proper name.

Personality:

Taking inspiration from Hawaiian culture, I will have this character be very close to nature. She chooses to live in the middle of a tropical forest, creates magical meals using purely natural ingredients and is outraged by deforestation.

The choice to make the mentor an elderly family member allows for a lack of explanation as how they know so much about the world around them, with it being mostly self explanatory. This also means that there's good reason for you to have to sort out the current issues as she has grown too old to help anymore.

I want there to be a strong contrast between the grandmother's personality and her weakening body. She will have a determined, fiery spirit as well as being pretty strict on you to show that her body may have weakened but her soul hasn't.

The name for this character is Grandmother Brooke.

Dialogue:

I will be trying to keep each line of dialogue to around ten words per sentence with a maximum of two sentences per line of dialogue. Your character is a silent protagonist and therefore wont have many/any dialogue choices most of the time.

Dialogue from Brooke for when you first start:

(Talking out loud to herself) "The forest is being ravaged by those awful creatures again."
"..."
"But I'm growing too old to do anything to stop it."
(Now talking directly to you) "I think it's about time I teach you about that magical symbol on the back of your head."
"Grandchild, you're no ordinary monster, you're a Soulmon."
"This grants you the wonderful power of soul-sharing. This power is exactly what we need to scare off those monsters."
"With a little generosity or negotiation, a regular monster may share part of it's soul with you."
"With part of their soul you may transform into their species at will."
"If you can find a fearsome monster to soul-share with, you may be able to scare off those creatures."
"Off you go now, don't keep me waiting!"

Once you return to Brooke after completing you goal the tutorial portion that I'm creating will end and so there is no more dialogue I will need to plan. This dialogue could obviously change in the future, hopefully some feedback from people can help me perfect this dialogue but so far I think I've achieved a good balance between necessary information and small narrative elements.

Visual Appearance:

Being a Palmzee, she will share many of the visual appearances of one with a few slight changes. As she is supposed to appear elderly, her colours and appearance will be more inspired by dying palm leaves. This means more whittled leaves, a more golden/yellow appearance and browning on the ends of the leaves to show signs of age.

To help emphasize that Brooke is no longer doing things that she may have used to when she was young, she holds a coconut bowl with her tail, rather than using the tail for it's intended purpose of tree climbing. This also shows innovation and intelligence as she knows how to use her tail for something useful despite not being as strong as it may have used to be.

Creating a title/logo

Usually for a project like this I wouldn't focus too much on something like the title but in this case the logo within the title is very important. The Soulmon symbol that will be marked on the character's forehead is also going to be the logo featured for the game. This means that I need to do research to make sure the symbol makes sense with the themes of the game.

I looked at some elemental symbols because of the variety of monster elements, some share symbols for the sharing part of the soul-share mechanic and some soul-related symbols for the soul part of the soul-share mechanic. These are the references I will be using to help me create a symbol and logo that is thematically correct with the game.

For the final symbol I ended up making it two spiralling swirl shapes representing souls being shared. I was going to use three swirls similar to one of the reference symbols but that wouldn't make much sense considering soul sharing is only done between two characters. For the title I just used a font that should hopefully fit with the stylized and fairly relaxing gameplay.

Asset List

To figure out what assets I will need, I first need a more focused idea on how this environment is going to look. I am going to use images from my environment research and stylized tropical themed games to start visualizing how the area will look and what assets I will need to create.

Looking at these references, I have a much better idea of what assets I could create for a more low-poly environment and so here's the list for assets for the natural part of the environment:

Palm tree
Tropical rock (three variants)
Tropical bush
Tropical flowers
Coconut
Palm log (deforested areas)
Palm stump (deforested areas)
Coconut bowl (for Brooke's cooking)

I think this is just enough variety of natural assets to make a colourful, tropical environment along with it's sadder, more deforested sections. There are more necessary assets however, I need to figure out how Brooke's house is going to look so that I can list the assets for that as well as listing the characters that need their own assets. At the start of this project, I made a mindmap which listed some features I wanted with Brooke's house, being traditionally tropical and pretty old as I imagine that Brooke may have built this house back in her younger years and has lived here ever since.

I found a few stylized tropical houses but I'm mostly keen on the middle one for it's simplicity, it also looks small enough for me to make the entire model as one asset rather than multiple modular ones. I would probably make it look a little less modern by changing the fabric door and glass windows into something made of easily accessible, natural materials as it would fit with Brooke's strong connection to nature better.

Rest of the necessary assets:

Brooke's house
Cocozee asset
Brooke asset
Obtainable monster asset

These assets will probably take longer to create than the natural ones, especially the character models because I may need to do research on how to give them simple animations. Another important thing to consider is that this will be a top-down game and so all these assets need to avoid obstructing the screen and should look appealing from the top.

Planning the Selection Screen

This is less of a proper menu and more of just the screen that you pick your beginning character on, the three choices being the nature, fire and water characters. This will be something I add if I have extra time rather than a main focus since it's not necessary, all it is for is to add context for how you get to this specific part of the game.

An important part of a character selection screen like this is making sure that the characters are clear to see and should have some form of basic information told about them within the screen. The most obvious piece of information is listing what makes the options different. In the case of monster collection games it's almost always the elemental typings. However, as a walking simulator, I made the choice that this game obviously wouldn't feature any combat, only exploration, puzzles and collection. This means that giving monsters their own elemental typings wouldn't make much sense.

In order to give the monsters more fitting abilities that make each one different, they have transportation/movement abilities instead. For example, Palmzee would be able to climb certain walls and surfaces, the water themed character would be able to swim in certain areas, a character may even have a special ability for solving a specific set of puzzles etc. This means that in my character selection menu I should specify what sort of transportation abilities they will grow up to achieve in order to give players a choice based on environmental preference. For example, if they like very forested and dense environments they would pick Cocozee, the climber.

Here's the very rough plan for what the selection screen will look like. In the actual game I will try to make the UI design as fitting with the game's style and how the game feels as possible. I think this screen will do a good job of being straight forward for new players to understand and will intrigue players who are used to seeing elemental typings featured as the beginning information, not transportation abilities.

One thing I did forget to include was some text asking you to pick one but that's easy to remember for creation of the actual selection screen. I wont be designing the two missing ones due to lack of time nor it being super necessary and so they will still be question marks in the finished menu too.

Designing Grandma Brooke

With the personality and purpose of my mentor character fully realized, I can now design the character's physical appearance to fit. The main appearance of grandma Brooke will obviously resemble Palmzee as that is the species she is but to show aging I intend to take inspiration from dying palm trees rather than healthy ones by using warmer and duller colours.

I will also try my best to convey her personality through her design, how she repurposes her useful monkey body for cooking rather than climbing and her strict but caring mindset towards you.

The design that I created for grandma Brooke features the dying palm leaf theme that I mentioned previously, as well as a bra/harness combination to emphasise that this character is female, thick eyebrows and a stern expression to emphasize her strictness and finally her use of her tail to help with her cooking to show off how she intuitively uses her monkey features

Posing is very important for conveying what a character is like, in this case I've made sure Brooke is sitting down as well as repurposing her tail to emphasize her age and have had her arms spread out as if to both appear determined and welcoming alongside her strict expression that she regularly has.

Designing Pajamare

Pajamare is the unlockable monster that will be featured in this tutorial section. This character will be found and unlocked by waking it up with a sound. Although not featured in this tutorial section, I would plan for this character to be used to scare off the invasive creatures on the island. This means that the character needs to have a threatening/predatory side that'd be used for this purpose. I decided that the most suitable choice was a sloth, being very lazy animals it'd make sense for them to be sleeping during the day. Despite Pajamare being herbivores, the invasive creatures would be new to the island and unknowing of what predators to avoid and so they would still be naturally threatened by the Pajamare character.

When gathering references for this character I first needed to look for what species of sloth I wanted to base this character on. After doing some research into tropical sloths I settled on basing it off of the Linnaeus's two-toed sloth because it has a simple pattern that it'd fit well with a stylized world.

Other sloth references that I gathered were drawn as very much magical and fantasy depictions of sloths which I felt would help both with my game's theming as well as this character's theming around sleeping and dreamlike features.

Finally, I gathered a couple character references from monster collection games that feature sleeping/dreamlike theming to help possibly give me ideas on how games successfully depict sleeping creatures.

The relaxed state of Pajamare features a body pattern that loosely resembles the Linnaeus's two-toed sloth with a couple additions for the sleep/dream theme. I used spots on the torso to resemble pajama buttons which combined with the frilly pattern around the neck happens to also look like a speech bubble. The face features shapes around the eyes that are supposed to loosely resemble shooting stars as well as a sleeping hat incorporated into the fur on Pajamare's head. In terms of colours I chose to feature purple as I see it as a magical or dreamlike colour as well as avoiding bright or sharp colours in order to give the character a calm appearance.

When designing the threatening state of Pajamare I wanted to make sure it fit with the dream theme. I decided that an almost nightmarish depiction of regular Pajamare would be summoned above the character like a cartoon dream/speech bubble. Firstly, it has a more bulky and aggressive stance than relaxed Pajamare, as well as more ruffled hair, fierce eyebrows and sharp teeth.

In line with the dream theme, I gave this depiction a teddy-like appearance by adding stitching between the frilly pattern and the main torso. The threatening state features a magical aura to emphasize that it's merely temporary and not part of Pajamare's actual body, only an illusion created by Pajamare's dreams.

Because this state wont be featured in the tutorial section I luckily don't have to worry about creating this in-game and only need to worry about the relaxed state.