
Turning
Art direction for an indie mobile game by Bailey Kalesti.
TURNING
Turning is an indie, mobile game designed by Tim Fowers. He’s also known for the amazing board games he’s designed.
I had the pleasure of developing the look and animations for Turning. And it was fun to work on a tiny team of one designer (Tim), one engineer (David), and myself as the artist. Later we got some folks for sounds and music, but it was mostly the three of us collaborating remotely in Unity. Fun! 😀
FINAL ART
Final screenshots of the game.
Game pieces.
BEHIND THE SCENES
I’ve worked on giant games, but even small, indie mobile games take a lot of work. We went through many visual design and animation experiments. Below is a sampling of what I came up with. Thank you to Tim for the feedback on gameplay! 😊
2D CONCEPTS
Ended up going with the 9th image here. It continued to evolve, but it was the route I liked most.
My ideal look for the game board. It had to change some more from this point for gameplay reasons. But my aim was to have the most minimal look possible.
ANIMATION
Some of the iteration that happened with animation. In the first few GIFs, we wanted to experiment with some crazier ideas before we did the 2D vector approach. Turned out to be too busy and hard to understand, so we abandoned it. Gotta try stuff, ya know? 😊
Then I made a few tests in the style below, and it’s what we went with…
An animation visualization for our engineer. Needed to get the animations playing at exactly the right times in code. So, I made this to help communicate what I wanted. It helped!
In the end, this was a delightful project to take part in. Creating highly animated 2D graphics in a game is something we rarely get to do as artists. Mostly because of engine limitations. But the simplistic nature of the game enabled us to spend more resources on animations and images.
And thank you to Tim and David for being such great partners in this endeavor! ❤