Pupey

Game Release

A while back I saw this game video on facebook. It was a simple action game. It’s the kind you play when you have a moment to spare and want to get annoyed in a flappy bird kind of way. In short, it’s not really the kind of game I am good a playing! Nevertheless, it’s the kind of game that due to the rather limited amount of artwork is quite quick to reskin.

The game was created in construct2 by the talented Algerian coder Hadjoudj Mohamed. Like most indie authors, he couldn’t find or afford an artist to help with the game.

The result was a working game with ‘coder art’ and UX/ UI problems that come with it. E.g. placing the play button away from the easy reach of the fingers, fading the buttons too much with the background and a general lack of polish.

I went ahead and took the title screen and altered it. Starting with the game character, working my way through the elements on the title screen and sorting out the UI in the progress. The main elements are a lot cleaner and more visible.
2Dgameartguru pupey ingame screen
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With the game character looking a lot like a mix between a bee and a minion the choice of a hexagon as the main design element was easy. The buttons had to stand out more from the background than in the original version. I went with a blue and purple gradient and chose orange as the contrasting opposite for the main buttons.

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Character Design

The character was simple enough to allow a couple of funny variations.

Note:
I used CorelDraw for the animation process. The combination of multiple pages (that export nicely to layered .psd files, which make it easy to export separate png files of the same size) and the use of symbols make it very easy to create the base set of images. Altering them for variations afterwards is a breeze. 

The character has an idle animation, flying up, crashing and a game-over animation – all up 22 frames. Once these frames were set up I just needed to alter the symbols once and CorelDraw would update all 22 pages of the animation for me.

The game is finally out on kongregate:
https://www.kongregate.com/games/Algsoft/pupey_preview

Give it a try!

2Dgameartguru pupey character screen