Late last year, creative agency Joystick Interactive tapped me to design and illustrate some characters for several Nick Jr UK online games targeted for very young children. After a few rounds of exploratory roughs and sketches (see this previous post for the sketch pages) for possible game characters, we settled on a set of jungle animals, but not before discarding some other characters that didn’t make it past the project pitch.
Rejected: “Basic shape monsters” and just monsters
These ended up as the final characters:
I also worked on several versions of the parrot and toucan characters.
Once the character design for the birds were approved, I cleaned them up and rendered them digitally in Illustrator. I presented several color studies for the client to choose from.
The client initially wanted a monochromatic color sceheme for the birds.
Other colors were brought in after, black in particular, to make the toucan more “toucan-like”
More color studies
Final toucan and parrot characters
I also worked on some of the game backgrounds and assets:
Game backgrounds for various levels of the Hide and Seek game, where the animals hide in the scene and the player has to click on them to find them
Additional game assets
The team at Joystick animated my characters, coded the games, designed the UI/UX, provided additional backgrounds and assets, and basically brought the game to life. It’s so awesome seeing my characters move around and see the game in action!
Game interface
The game live on the website
Check out the Nick Jr jungle animal games here on the Nick Jr UK website.
