Designing game characters could be a tricky task. You first need to decide on the type of your target audience, as issues as gender and age could have a massive impact on the overall outcome.

One the most obvious transformation the gaming industry has undergone in the past years was the massive adoption of games by females of all ages. This trend was backed mainly by the launch of mobile phones with gaming capabilities and the rise of social networks that introduced online games as a legitimate pass time activity. However, the most popular types of games one usually finds on these platforms are casual, meaning simple and easy-to-learn games with splashy graphics and a repetitive game play. Nevertheless, this development paved the way for a whole new type of players that held Snake as their ultimate gaming experience (don't worry, we love Snake!). Most of the new players were women from different ages that still held the "cute and cuddly" type of graphics as the holy grail of character design.

We wanted to develop a casual, puzzle-based game that will attract both genders and without any age restrictions. So based on the aforementioned trend, we outlined what we wanted on what we refer to as "The four aspects of character design":

Colors - We chose "soft" colors that will be more attractive to our female friends, but still not too "pinkish" to turn the strong gender away in horror. Different characters should of course have different colors with clear contrast between them and the background. If you have characters with some sort of positive relation between them, you may consider applying them with colors of the same "family". This will help the player to learn the in-game interaction faster.

Shape - It came with no surprise that most of the girls who reviewed the early sketches preferred the curvier, rounder animal design on that of the pointy and sharp one.

Size - Regardless of the whole gender issue, when designing a mobile game, you should always take into consideration the proportions of the characters compared to each other and the surrounding world. Pixel real estate is not as abundant on the mobile screen as it is on your computer, so you need to carefully plan the size and proportions of each character. Don’t forget that casual games are all about animation, so make sure these proportions are good even when your character moves around the screen in different speed and interacts with other characters.

Details - As a rule of thumb, you should always make sure that the characters look good at either mobile, tablet or PC size. You can bestow multiple details on your character, but check that they are visible and comprehensible on different screen sizes. You could drop a few non significant details for the mobile version, as long as you keep the overall appearance of the character. A nice way of judging if each character sticks out, is by employing the "silhouette method". Darken the surface of every character and see if you can still tell them apart quick enough. that should do the trick.


Our next post will cover the thoughts on background design.

On this blog we thought to share with you the behind-the-scene process of making a mobile game.

A few words about us, for those who wish to know our background. All you self centered readers could just skip to the next paragraph. Yaniv and I met in 2003 when I founded my previous mobile games studio, Gamebit. We were one of the first companies to develop J2ME and SKVM games for mobile phones that were the highlight of the time. 64Kb and 128Kb sized games, lots of Midi music and long sale cycles to mobile operators. Yaniv stayed in the gaming world up until last year, when he decided to travel to Japan, while I took the business route and became a boring corporate guy. However, developing games is hard bug to get rid off and in the past weeks, after Yaniv returned from the land of the rising sun, we decided to found a new venture dedicated – at least for now – for mobile games.

TLDR; We hope we know wtf we're doing


Keep it simple, stupid!

We aimed to go easy for our first game and develop a title based on the following "easy" points:

1. Easy to develop – No complicated level design.
2. Easy to understand – The player should "get the point" as quickly as possible.
3. Easy to control – Highly important when dealing with mobile phones

We rather go back "easy" to the mobile domain and relearn as we go, rather then go straightaway for the mass-multiplayer-tons-of-graphic type of game.

Combining the first two aforementioned points, we figured it will be best to introduce the player with a gaming world that he will instantly recognize the relationships of the objects within it. For example, if you start a game with rock, scissors and paper, you will automaticity know that rock beats scissors, scissors cut paper and paper (for some reason known only to the gods of rock, scissors and paper) "kills" rock. Since we already had our fun share of rock, scissors and paper on Alex Kid back in the 90s, we took this concept a step further in terms of the objects involved.

Animal collective

The concept of our game will be the same, but with animals instead of the inanimate objects. We chose a mouse, a cat, a dog and an elephant, animals that even a toddler knows how they react (or should react) to each other. Based on this choice and correlating with the "keep it simple for first time approach", we decided that the game will be a Puzzle, rather than a blood, goring animal slaughter FPS.

Since we didn't want to create a complicated game, we thought that the game will take place in a single screen. We figured that the animals will be falling from the top of the screen onto some sort of revolving surface, making some sort of an animal tower. The object of the game is to make sure the tower doesn’t reach the top and the player will control the height by choosing where to drop the next animal. If he drops a cat over a mouse, the mouse will disappear, extending the player's session and earning him points. If a dog falls on top of a cat, same thing, as well as with the elephant and the dog. And of course, it is a well known fact the elephants are afraid of mice, thus we close our relationship circle.




Here is an initial sketch of the poor animals. We promise it doesn't look this crappy now.



On our next post we will look at the thoughts behind the characters and more in-depth level design.