Before I started producing concept art for my enemy characters, I made an idea generation mindmap to help start an inspiration flow and make it easier for me to have something to reference back to when drawing. I knew I wanted the enemy characters to be based on witches’ companions/familiars as I wanted witch symbolism to be prevalent throughout my game design choices. The stereotypical familiars for witches are frogs, toads, black cats, crows, horned owls and white rabbits. I knew that I wanted the enemies to blend in with passive animals to force the player to discover which is hostile. To do this I knew that I needed to create a mutated version of each passive animal as it would be an easy way to make them look similar but have a physical differentiating aspect to distinguish friend from foe.
I drew two versions of each animal, I aim to have 10 different enemies to get into battle with but only drew the majority, 6, as I don’t plan to create the whole game concept as it would be too lengthy to produce in one semester. If I were to make 4 more, I would choose less stereotypical witch familiars but forest inhabiting such as birds, foxes etc. to then space it out in between the stereotypical ones to give variation to the players’ experience and battles.
I went onto Lospec, a pixel colour palette website, and tried to get a soft but vibrant palette to colour my animals. I knew I wanted it to represent a warmer forest style. I utilised the Lost Century Palette by CopheeMoth to create this vibe.
For the mutated characters instead of making them dull and colder in colour to represent that they are hostile, I was thinking of creating aura effects around them instead to achieve this.
Enemy Animal with Aura Animation
Aura Animation
An example of the aura animation that will encapsulate the enemy creatures will help the player choose the right animal they need to interact with. The example is done with the frog but this will apply to all the enemy creatures.
The interaction with the player protagonist and the enemy creatures will be the harvest/exorcism scenes. After this scene, if the player chooses to exorcise instead of harvesting, which would turn the creatures into souls, the creature will instead turn into a previous coven member.
An example of the representative coven member for the frog creature is shown on the left. The colour scheme would match the creature that they were turned into and the passive version of the animal will be placed somewhere on their design, to represent that the former coven member is an ally.
I intend for each creature to get its own representative coven member.