The Art of ANIMUS

Auguste Lubickaite
Dec 2, 2020
3 min read

You wake up in a forgotten jungle with dreams of a different world. Your perspective is warped, and to fix this, you must traverse the ruins to seek salvation from Soleil and Phoebe. They caused this, and they can fix it.

A platformer in 2 weeks, let's go! Time for redemption.

Fortunately, this time our lecturer assigned official leader roles for each team, with a slight twist: All of the leaders were girls, and gladly I happened to be one of them. I was looking forward to applying the lessons that I learned from my past mistakes and not second guess whether I am entitled to be assertive in case something goes wrong or not.

I knew that I want to have daily calls to get to know my new team better, and after discussing our experiences, I realized that we only have one-pixel artist, which meant that It's my time to shine in both leader and environment art positions.

Fantasy platformer - when hearing about such a genre you know that the possibilities for a game are endless. Our brainstorming sessions included ideas from having main mechanics revolve around color-coded puzzles to parkour based gameplay. However, nothing seemed to stand out as much until we looked at a completely different genre like FPS shooter Titanfall 2 and got inspired by their time travel mechanic. This is where we started shaping it into our own unique way and agreed to create puzzles out of two different perspectives.

ANIMUS is a 2D platformer which gives you an ability to change your perspective of the world. Complete 8 different levels by continuously switching from human to monster form and interact with platforms previously untouchable.

Early Concept

As an artist, I started generating various quick sketches to visualize the potential aesthetic of the game.

Early concept:

Monster perspective Human perspective

However, after the second artist showed their character designs, I noticed that our styles are completely different, but I was willing to switch to pixel art to match as much as possible and continue making environment art.

To make the style more understandable and quickly executable, I suggested for the game to take place in a forgotten jungle so that we can avoid any additional details and fit into the 2-week deadline.

1st Theme

Light theme

Initial idea was to have our monster jump out of a Tiki statue and turn into a human form as an intro cutscene, but due to lack of time, we had to simplify this by scratching the statue off completely.

Tiles and character artist: Kai Bryant

To create a sense of depth in a 2D atmosphere, each theme was broken down into 5 layers which were later programmed into parallax.

In-game screenshot with post-processing effects

Monster theme

With a help of masking in Photoshop, I was able to hue shift and repaint individual trees and create a magical night when the player enters monster form.

Shader imitation in Photoshop

In-game transition test

2nd Theme

The player leaves the forest and gets exposed to a wide view of ruins above the clouds

The dark palette eye dropped from the 1st Theme and repainted in the 2nd one

3rd Theme

3rd theme was worked upon in the second part of the second week, so I made the planning and execution more efficient with a help of castle assets from Szadi art while I painted the background.

Castle assets: Szadi art. Torches: Kai Bryant

3rd theme changes the level design from horizontal to vertical as the player gets to enter one of the ruins at the end of the game and climb up the forgotten castle.

4th Theme

The player meets"Soleil" in a human form on top of the castle.

The player meets"Phoebe" in a monster form on top of the castle.

The 4th theme was planned to run the cutscene of the human form changing into the monster, which dissolves into the sky as the final scene of the game.

However, due to the state of the game being too buggy, this scene had to be scratched off to prioritize the smoothness of the gameplay.

Conclusion

All in all, even if not all 6 team members were active enough to make this game smooth to win 1st place in gameplay, I was excited to see that people admired the idea and art behind it by giving the 1st place in the "Most innovative" section of the game jam. I do think that it is clear to see how the tiles and the background differ in styles, but the second artist was working really hard to fulfill every idea we thought of in the meetings which wouldn't be possible without a proactive team.