09 Jun First sketches of Momonga!

Hi everybody! I’m Tom, I’m currently working as a game artist intern here at Paladin Studios.

I am the lead/ main graphic artist on this project, working together with the rest of our art team consisting of Derk de Geus (art director), Niels van Egmond (lead technical artist) and Dominique van Oosterom (3d artist intern).

Up until this point, the first week of production, I’ve been working together with Derk to develop the backstory behind the game. Doing this had several reasons, besides the obvious one of creating cool fluff. The backstory we created, which you’ll undoubtly hear more about very soon, functions mostly as a framework to place our game and character designs in. It helps to justify every design choice we make.  Personally I think it’s always very helpful to have some overarching story or theme to design things. It adds context to the artwork.

The creative process until now has been amazing and quite dramatic at times. It all started quite simply, really. When I came on board a couple of months ago and Derk asked me to look at the concept of this project called ”Pinball Forever”. Basically it was a neverending pinball machine with one ball. A cute, furry one with eyes, mind you. I played it and it was very addictive. But this early prototype obviously lacked something, and it was my task to find out what it was.

With this in mind I started sketching. Then, as you can see in the above exploraty sketches, I added a ‘tail’ to the ball. This small extra feature opened up a lot of new possibilies for various character designs, not to mention gameplay mechanics. From that moment the main character, our focus at this point, underwent many transformations. From a mere ball with a tail, it switched between a frog, a monkey, an old fat Indiana Jones type adventurer, a robot, an alien with psychic powers, you name it. At some point I even was quite fond of a radish kind of character! Shortly after this ‘tail’ batch Derk and I had an awesome brainstorm, where we bounced off ideas faster than lightning and this was the point we came up with the ‘flying squirrel’ character. After this brainstorm things started taking shape very quickly…

We’ll slowly introduce the story and the cast of characters in the next couple of posts, so keep your eyes peeled!

Cheers and stick around!

Tom