Pets

The 8 pets I created for Mr Autofire, Starlet, Celeste, Zappy, Noodle, Pickles, Bean, Lizzie and Woofie, in both their small gameplay versions and the detailed loadout full glory.

I started with some sketches, trying to figure out the direction to take. The main inspiration was Pokémon, due to their variety of creatures in both types and design.

From very early, Mikko K suggested a great idea: two versions of each pet. One, a simple, gameplay version with minimal detail. And another bigger, more detailed version for the loadout screen. Taking the robot dog as an example of how simple we could go.

Game designers wanted to start with at least six different pets (for game mechanic purposes) and each of them with their own type of attack or perk. So we had fire, ice, electric, poison, a power attacker useful for bosses and a farming pet.

The one that served as an example and informed the rest of the pets was Woofie. He was basically unchanged from its initial concept, which proved how strong and adorable he was from early on. Who doesn't love robots and dogs??

We had a dog so we needed a cat. There were some options for a powerful shooter, but a cat's big eyes seemed like the perfect fit for this perk. I decided to make her a cyclops to make this quality stand out even more.

I knew I wanted a fire salamander, but I didn’t want a stereotypical orange lizard design, so I decided to get away from that and have a violet/black one that could represent coal. Originally she was limbless but I didn't want head with a big tail.

You can see the origins of Pickles in one of the original sketches. All the pets are supposed to fly so how to make a walrus fly? Easy, put him on a snowy cloud. His name comes from the two icicles that work as tusks.

I liked the idea of a floating manta flapping its wings in the air and I will say that my proudest design element here is how its two ears resemble an electrical plug. This one was the toughest to animate due to it's different body type.

This spider actually started as an electric type, but we were still missing a poison pet, and since he was so well liked he switched types. This was the pet I had more doubts about, so I invested more time into fine tuning the design of his abdomen.

After the initial batch of six pets, I created Starlets months later. By this point I already had a system of how to come up with pets so it was way easier to go from sketch to final art. I focused more on exploring more choices for the gameplay version.

I went with violet as the main color, which informed the rest of the design.

The latest one I created, I wanted to create a "cooler" pet, rather than a cute one, while still maintaining some cohesion with the other ones. The original idea was to make it a white wolf but we already had many light-colored pets.

Some of the discarded designs for the original pets. A poison dragon, a fire pig, a robot bunny and the original electric version of what ultimately became Noodle.