Katharina Batzel - Project - Onion's Adventure

This was the very first project done during the first semester. My first impression on game art and how to create a game.
I always loved to create adorable characters with a quite simple style. The whole team was excited about the idea, especially as for the first game. For this projects I was responsible for the art and continuous style as well as the style guide.

Onion's Adventure is a 2D platformer. It is about a cute little Onion living in the forest village with her family until the destructive insects came. Separated from her family, Onion jumps her way through the forest to reach the save hideout and find her family there. She has to be careful, she needs to avoid the insects or else she gets eaten by them. But she is not alone! Her friends Spiderbuddy, Firemanda and Krakenmushroom are here to help her!

Cover Art as a collaboration by Anastasia Haar and me.
The Logo is made by Nicole Arzer.

The mockup of our game with ingame assets only.

Characters

Besides the concept of the main character Onion, there used to be another character with her: Spiderbuddy. The thought of Oinions buddy as a hook got cancelled, since the team still loved the idea of Spiderbuddy, we kept them as the Tutorialspider within the game.

The first characters, after the main ones, were the enemies. Instead of four we insisted on three enemies since one of them had the same but slower threat pattern as another one.

The Concept Art of Onion, the main character of the Game. An iteration of the Red Onion made it into the game.

Spiderbuddy the helpful hook for Onion. Tutorialspider is the final input for the game to keep our nostalgic idea.

The first enemy of the game: The Bark Beetle. We've decided to look for some nature destroying insects which are against Onion and the forest. For animation simplicity reasons we chose to show the feet without the legs such as in Rayman.

The second enemy was a flying enemy to get a variation in path-patterns. Even though the Onion Leaf Miner would be a better choice storywise, we've decided to continue with the moth for style reasons.

The last enemy is the Mealworm. Having a set point where they can move up and down a little to block Onions way.

The iteration cycle of all enemies in Onion's Adventure. Snarky Snark didn't make the cut since it was only a slower version of Muddy. Another but cancelled idea was about Onion being able to jump on Snarky to reach higher points. For style reasons the insects have 4 instead of 6 legs.

Environment

For the environment I did some assets the character has to interact with, even if it is only for walking on it or climbing. Besides that there also non interactive assets, the decoratives, to embelish the assets alltogether by looking more natural.

For the background we used different layers to create a parallax effect by including the foreground as well.

It is important to let the player realize the path of where to go without getting confused by the background.

Modular platforms for reuse and natural edges. Decoratives for ambient feeling and hiding hard edges of different assets making them look more natural.

Hedges as a nice detail to mark the beginning and the end of the game.
Different vines with different designs for either static or dynamic appearance. The static one is more compact while the dynamic vine seems lighter and therefore more able to swing around.

The Background of the game. Each row of trees as wel as the fireflies has their wn layers. It has an old paper book like look for the style of the whole game.

The trees at the background which are rooted on the platforms near Onion. Gives a better feeling of progression.

Foreground assets for a parallax effect and a better progression feeling.

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