Astrobreaker is a brickbreaker game for iOS and Android.
The game melds casual brickbreaker gameplay with collection features seen in more midcore titles. In Astrobreaker, players journey across the galaxy collecting fun new ships and abilities to help them solve new challenging levels.
Ship Design
One of the most unique elements of Astrobreaker is its collectible ships.
Because we wanted them to feel aspirational to players, it was important that each one feel unique and exciting.
Working with the space theme, I put together moodboards and worked with the game’s Design Director to lay the foundation for how a spaceship in the Astrobreaker universe should look and feel. I designed concepts for the ships that players would be collecting and did many iterations for each of them based on what sort of abilities they would have.
To avoid leaning too hardcore, we looked at bringing in recognizable elements from animals, while also ensuring that we kept details bold and readable. We put a strong focus on silhouette and color palette so that ships could be recognizable at a glance and stand out from one another in collection screens.
We wanted to keep the proportions of the ships fairly squat and chunky. This was both to ensure they could fit in the gameplay area, but also to push the toyetic, collectible feel of them.
Character Design
Though the ships are primarily what players see during gameplay, the characters are able to show up in moments of celebration to add further narrative. Further, they also show up in small interstitial dialogs to deliver tutorial information in specific levels.
Throughout development, I worked on a few different pilot designs to work in tandem with the ships. Because the ships are the main avatar for the player during gameplay, it allowed us to really play with size and proportion when it came to the pilots, since they wouldn’t need to be bound to the same restrictions of the space in the HUD.
I wanted to have a mix of not only silhouette, but personality and even species. To help visually link pilots to their ships, I had them share visual cues and color palettes with the ships I had already designed.
Once we had locked down our first few pilot designs, myself and another concept artist on the team created some cleaned up renders of them and did some additional art style tests.
In addition to the pilot, I also generated some ideas for a sidekick co-pilot. After trying a few ideas for passengers to pick up, I was inspired by the fable of the rabbit on the moon. I wanted to come up with a little robot buddy that was equal parts cute and sass.
User Interface
We wanted the game to evoke feelings of excitement and have a retro Saturday-morning-cartoon flair that didn’t lean too heavily into hard sci-fi.
This is something that I also wanted to bring across in our UI through the use of bold colors, fun shapes, and animations. My goal was to keep things feeling fun and punchy without having any of the screens feel sterile or devoid of character.
VFX
The concepts I worked on for VFX drew from the same Saturday morning cartoon and anime references that we pulled for the ships. Each was designed to feel like a big fun moment for players that would allow each ship to have its own trademark wow moment.
I wanted the VFX to feel bold and expressive, without hurting the readability of the gameplay.
Asset Development
I worked with our Engineering Lead to develop a system that could procedurally place greeble around the areas of the bricks that we defined. This allowed us to add in a variety of detail that could be different between levels, and help to theme specific areas.
It was important to keep the gameplay and environment in theme with the rest of the game, so I wanted to avoid using drab colors or skewing too realistic. We wanted to bring a more colorful version of space where textures felt more illustrative and asteroids could be bright magenta or orange.
With that in mind, we developed the environment sprites in a way that let us use RGB channel tinting to define multiple color palettes for each object. This let us get additional mileage out of some reused assets, and gave our Designers the ability to use certain colors for specific levels or areas.
Logo
I designed the logo for the project, drawing inspiration from our galactic theme and the chunky bolt shapes from some of our ships. I worked on several different
The lettering was custom done in by hand and the entire logo was created as a vector asset using Adobe Illustrator.