The Last Jeli
The Last Jeli is a game about a group of sentient Jellies whose planet is collapsing around them. Their only chance of survival is getting to their spaceship and leaving the planet, but unfortunately there’s only room for one of them on board. As a result, the jellies will have to race each other to be the sole survivor.
For this project, I worked with a team of eight people. As the 2D and 3D artist I created conceptual sketches for characters and environments, 2D backgrounds, 2D animations for the main menu graphics as well as decorative 3D models.
Initial concepts
During pre-production, my main task was to work with the art director to create conceptual designs for the background and decide which one should be put into production. Here, I got to test different compositions and styles along with other 2D artists on the team.
Initially, our art director settled on a desert-like environment, which was later changed to the purple one we see in the finished game. This environment was drawn in several layers so that we could implement parallaxing in the finished game, adding depth to the 2D background.
Prallaxing setup
For the characters we chose the humanoid designs over the spherical ones. This was mainly due to the fact that this is a fast paced game, and so diverse shapes and colours would help characters stand out and be easily recognisable for the player. The expressive, cartoony look of the humanoid characters also fit the comical tone of the game better.
Implementing visual assets
Towards the end of production my main task was to decorate the floating islands that the players would run on. I also created some of the models for the foliage we used to decorate the islands, which were then given textures by other artists on the team. The models were kept simple to match the low poly style of the game.
