Mind Hunter

4th semesterendproject of my Game Design study.

Our project "Mind Hunter" is a quickpaced hack'n slash game, with a cute horror aesthetic set in the deep Unconscious of our Maincharacter. There he needs to fight of the personified concepts of the seven deadly sins that are eager to eat his brain and curse him to doom.

Role: Lead Artist, Animator

This game is released on Itch.io as part of our Semesterproject.

So if your interested give it a shot. :)

Play here -->

For anyone interested, here is our finished Artbible:

Artbible

Aren - The Protagonist

Aren, the Protagonist of Mind Hunter. A genuinely good hearted Guy, who sets himself apart from the others by being so virtuous it is impossible for the Monsters to fully kill him. Instead he is being revived over and over again, trapping both the Monsters and Aren in an unending Battle.

Initial Conception

During the process, there were some Challenges. One of them is a limited colour palette that only allowed up to four base colours to be used in the game. Which meant for our Protagonist, that he needed to be monochrome but still eye-catching enough, for the Player to not lose him during the Fight.

Therefore I decided for a simple, cartoony Design that focuses on visibility.

I opted out of Legs or Arms (only Hands are there) to make the Animation process easier, keep only the important parts for the Gameplay and to give him a general feeling of other-worldliness as he is only an abstract construct inside of his mind.

Final Art

At the end, I made 12 Sprites, from which 8 made it into the game.

Animation

The most important aspect with out Animation was effiency and visibility.

We decided for a hacky Animationtype with few FPS, as the Animation would only take 1-2 seconds in-game and that way we could cut out unnecessary work out of our tight schedule. VFX Animations were then made in Unity.

To play, press and hold the enter key. To stop, release the enter key.

Kiles - The Shopkeeper

Kiles, the Shopkeeper who sells useful Items to Aren to help him in his fight.

His face is hidden inside a Box but as to not scare away the customers he hand-scribbled a face unto the box to appear friendly and aproachable.

Kiles, and his concept of a friendly helper, is a nod to another project called "Across the Universe". My group and I decided to pay homage to Kiles from our last Game, a spaceship- boardcomputer who helped the protagonist on his adventures.

That is why I wanted this variant of Kiles to have similarities to his predecessor without making him an actual robot.

So I stuck his head in a box!

Not only did that allow me to make a design closely resembling "ComputerKiles", this way I also avoided making a too human character in a Game that is supposed to be abstract.

Change of Concept

Over the course of the project there were some changes to our initial Design.

We wanted the Shopkeeper to be a reminder to Aren's real-life Friend, so a second Concept had to made, fitting to the new design choices.

Taller in statue, a "Big Brother"- type of friend and a laid- back attitude, I designed the Character with those things in Mind.

Only two things were kept from the initial Design; The Reminders of "ComputerKiles" and the Shopkeeper's Jacket.

Lust

Pride

Sloth

Greed

Envy

Wrath

Gluttony

Sofya Girenko

Chamez

Enemies Animations

The Concepts were made by my talented teammembers; Sofya and Chamez. You can find the Links to their respective Portfolio, where they talk about their Designs in more Detail on the left as well :D

Once my teammembers were finished with the concepts and Sprites of the Seven deadly Sins it was my Job to animate them. Out of the Seven we included three of them into the actual game, two of which I animated.

The Weapons

Another Member of the Team, TrueSer, developed the Concepts for our Weapons, which I then finalized.

We included worm-like appendices to the Design that resemble the intestines texture on the Ground in our Game. Furthermore we added big blocky Shadows imitate shiny medal. In combination with the yellow base color, the weapons are strongly reminiscent of “holy weapons”.

Additional Content

During our last weeks of the project, the art department had almost finished with most of the Must- Haves, so we sat down and created addtitional weapon designs as part of our hypothetical future plans for Mindhunter.

At the end i designed the Spears and the Shotguns.