Project Blob
Designer and Prop Artist
Project Blob puts the player in the shoes of a little girl raising a very dangerous pet.
Its visuals have a cartoon style with horror elements; the player has to find food for their pet around their house and eventually, as it starts to run out, around town. The game takes place in a rural farm just outside of a small village where a family is raising their daughter.
The gameplay consists of a side-scrolling point and click horror adventure, where the player is able to go between the different levels and find out how to best solve the puzzles in the areas in order to get the food to feed their new friend, play with them, and more. As they progress, the pet will get bigger in an attempt to (at first glance) protect the little girl.
At the end of the prototype, once the pet has eaten enough, it runs back to the child's bedroom before devouring her alive.
The little girl protagonist I designed lives in the countryside, and is innocent and curious. I designed her to look iconic and easy to simplify, and her colour scheme was themed around apples, as I thought that would be a cute and unique colour scheme for the cartoony vibe. She was also designed as generic enough to not belong in a specific historical era.
I drew some of the assets from the prop list made by the designers in order to really nail down the style with the help of mine and the other artists’ mood boards, theme and aesthetics of the game. These were greenlit by the rest of the team before I started on the production art. I decided to wait until at least one of the backgrounds was completed before starting to work on the final production level assets, as to keep that sense of belonging between the background and assets by matching colour schemes and outline/line art colour and thickness.
Following are the finalized props, both their detailed inventory versions and how they appear in the point-and-click puzzle levels.
The puzzle in the kitchen was initially different – the plan shown to me by the designers included drawing every number from 0 to 9 as fridge magnets, with four numbers separated from the rest to form the lock’s correct password. Instead, I proposed to only make four magnets, each a different colour, and make the players match each to the colour of the specific digit in the lock. I felt like that would be slightly less weird-looking in the game world.
At first, my plan was to hand-write every single number for the puzzle, but because of time restraints, I had to give up and let the programmers use a cartoony font instead, which would be a lot quicker.
