Star Beasts was a game I developed in a team in my second year of university. Using a fellow course-mate’s game design document (GDD), my team was tasked with making a vertical slice of a game. In the proposed game, the player would take on the role of Leo, one of the constellations who had fallen from the sky after an attack on all the constellations by Ursa Major. The player would then have to free the other constellations from Ursa Major’s evil influence through fighting and defeating them as well as their minions.
Although we began by trying to follow the GDD, it became clear that we would need to improvise in areas that hadn’t been fully explained in the document. This meant that I worked on re-designing the narrative to make it more cohesive and I spent a lot of the project researching the origins of the stories behind constellations with particular emphasis on the zodiac signs. I worked on designing the characters and environments for the game, using a combination of research and the original GDD for inspiration, and I made frames for the opening cutscene which was used to introduce the story to any players.
Character concept work:
Environment layouts & concept work:
Introductory cutscene frames:
