For the Queen
About: "For the Queen" is a unique blend of shoot-em-up and real-time strategy, developed by a team of 5. We tried creating a game from two given prompts: Shoot-em-up and Swarm-commander. We decided on the idea and main mechanics as the whole team, and then I moved on to mainly working as the lead artist.
Date: 2025 February-March (5 weeks)
Role: Game designer, Lead artist
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Character design
We decided to have 3 different characters for our game: Ants, Bees and Wasps. You play as the ant swarm, mainly consisting of mindless soldier units, who see the wasps as evil enemies and the bees as naive and clueless. I tried to portray these things through the design of the characters. I did a few rounds of concepts for this project, as I wanted the whole team to agree on one design and push for perfection.
Swarm Units Initial Concepts:
Queen's concepts:
Swarm Units Secondary Concepts:
Swarm Units Colour Iterations:
In-game assets:
Art Direction
We were going for a more playful, silly, even childish look for our game, to contrast the theme of it being a war between different species. This is why I tried to create a bright, lively and unserious look. Here you can see the moodboard I made and some initial drawings of the vision for the game.
Cinematic
We had a pretty extensive cinematic intro at the beginning of our game, so that the players could get acquainted with the backstory. I learned a lot from working on this, especially about pacing and in-engine (Unity) implementation and animation.
Concepts:
Stills of the Cinematic:
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Environment
While the environment was mainly my other teammate's responsibility, I pitched in a bit as well, for the sake of saving some time. We used modular assets for the environment, such as grass, flowers, flower pots, rocks. There were also the different species' bases for which I drew the game asset versions.
