In our game Crown of Creation, we have designed three types of enemies, all of which are Bugs. I am responsible for two of them, and this is my second, of which I am very happy with the design, compared to my first one. The cyan color comes from energy crystals in the game. All living creatures use them to get power, so I needed the design to show that in some way. Since this enemy’s main design feature is its wings because it’s the only flying enemy in the game, I wanted them to have a cyan colored glow to them.
In the beginning, the wings were transparent, which I thought looked good and realistic. Although I’m not aiming for a realistic design, it still made sense for them to be transparent, and I’m aiming to modify that but right now I need to focus on other things. I also want to blacken the five eyes so that it’s more obvious that they are eyes.
One of our designers created the first design of a character to our game, and I have tried to use her art as a style guide. What inspired me most about her design is that she made a lot of small shapes on the exoskeleton, and that made it look creepy and very bug-like. This is why the torso has a lot of small shapes, in order for the bug to get some texture to it. I also wanted it to be more obvious to the player that the enemy has absorbed power from the crystals, so I opened up the back of the bug and made it’s “insides” glow cyan.
For inspiration to the shape of the bug, I googled terms such as “flying bugs” to get some ground to stand on. I quickly realized that most bugs have 6 legs and a pair of antennae as well as a body divided into parts. Usually a tiny head and a large body, although I didn’t want the design to look too much like a regular fly but with unnatural colors, so I reversed the order of the body parts. I was also a bit inspired by light bugs, and how their shiny butt part is usually exaggerated in animated movies, and added a separate butt part. I also thought it looked more fleshy and big/creepy, like how moths are grosser than butterflies because they have a fat body.
The background for our game is going to be dark blue, so I chose that for my file so that I would pick good colors for the design. The dark purple of the body is quite close to the background color, might be up for editing, but for now me and my QA/team think that it’s fine for now. We have yet to put the design in the game, or on an actual background from the group, but when we do we will be able to make a decision. ⬛
Julia E Granstedt 
Julia. Your post has a good structure in general which made it easy to understand what you have been doing. You explain what design choices you made when creating this asset and why you made those choices. For example why the bug is fat and glows in cyan.
You also tell the reader where and how you got inspiration for the bugs design but you don’t explain how you actually created it, in other words your work process. This might be something to think about for your future posts. It doesn’t have to be much but a small insight in how you work, if you had any problems during production and in that case how you solved them could be interesting as well. You could also try to make it even more clear what you’r trying to teach the reader. A nice punchline in the end that gives the reader a message to carry with him/her is always powerful.
Other than that I must say, as a fellow artist, I’m very impressed with your work. Something I have to mention though is that I didn’t actually see that the bug had any legs at all until I got to the part where you wrote about it and took a closer look. I don’t know how your background in the game will actually look but if it’s as dark as this you might want to keep this in mind ;).
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