Here is my final mockup! Complete with (photoshopped) Donkey and Diddy, Re-imagined Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze HUD, speech bubble and bull's eye!
Here is the same final environment image minus all the HUD, UI and fancy stuff! Below are some more beauty shots of my environment! I think it came out great, check it out!
This was a fun angle to capture! Definitely not indicative of any possible gameplay but a cool shot nonetheless
This shot and the two below are hands down my favorite, even though they don't really represent how I'd imagine the gameplay would work. I think the plant in the bull's eye socket here just lines up super well, and the stylization really comes through
This is how I imagine the landscape would look if Donkey and Diddy were just strolling by this area, and never got close enough to the bull skull to wake it up!
An even further view from through the arch. Random, but I kind of get Trials' series vibes from this one, since I can imagine a dirtbike just zooming on top of the rocks here!
Concept Image for my environment! The bull skull is a little terrifying here, haha. The tilt-shift look is something I think Nintendo games do really well, so I figured I'd try it out here! Obviously it didn't make the cut, since I think it strays too far from Retro's style, but it would be neat! I'm happy with how the lighting evolved too since this concept. I think this was a bit too dark and saturated.
The sand I created in Substance Designer. I ended up balancing out the colors more by removing the dark browns, but this was a great start. I exported 4 different versions of this sand with different rock orientations, to avoid repetition.
Stylized rounded cactus material created with some help from a video by Lorenzo Procentese, found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFEfKT17u7o&feature=emb_title
Agave Leaf
Cactus Flower
Stylized Desert Grass 1
Stylized Desert Grass 2
I hadn't set up the whole texture structure yet but here was my little round flowering cactuses with just the base color! I think they're very cute
Above are my two tall cacti! It was fun to figure out the stylization for them! There are a lot of good stylized cactus silhouettes online to get inspiration from!
Stylized Arch from my concept art. I decided to add the lighter color bands to both give detail and to help match Retro Studio's distinctive style from DKC: Returns and DKC: Tropical Freeze
Stylized Background Mesa adjusted a bit to better fit the shapes in the scene
Midground Mesa positioned behind the big bull skull
Midground Pillar, with its shape adjusted to cater to the overall style better
Side mesa, barely visible in the concept art but will help fill up space nicely in the final scene! This one turned out to be one of the most fun to work on, along with the arch with their distinct shape languages
Some untextured Bull Skull renders. I looked at DKC: Returns' Skellyrex, Skullyrex, and Bonehead Jed enemies for the style, most notably in exaggerated eye socket size and small number of enlarged teeth. I thought the cowboy hat would also help sell the kind of subtle humor I love about the DKC series
