Le Petit Shooter

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In the Ludum Dare 38, a group of friends made a game:

Le Petit Shooter was made in a couple of days (two and a half?) for the LD38 competition. In the first night, we brainstormed what to do with the concept of "Little Planet" and when someone came with the idea of a western ("this planet is too small for the both of us") I jumped in with the idea of Le Petit Prince and suggested a game where two characters would meet each other and say "this asteroid is too small for the both of us."

The gameplay was heavily inspired by Worms ("what if the worms moved in real time and could ride their rockets?") and somewhat inspired by Mario Galaxy. Visually I just injected my own references and techniques and inspired myself directly from Exupery's art whenever possible.

I was tasked with making every graphical art of the game:

HUD, UI, character sprites, bullets, roses, effects etc. Everything that was used in the LD38 version of the game was made by me, using absolutely only Adobe Illustrator from the beginning to the end. In the post-LD38 version, the only asset that wasn't done in vector art (thus, me) was the asteroid's texture, which was a commissioned watercolor art. In an hypothetical finished post-LD38 version of the game, the texture would be reused for every other asset of the game to make it look more relatable towards Exupery's works.

The basic asteroid shape is based on a painting done by Exupery. It was the first asset made before the stars and planets in the background. I quickly doodled the characters and the team gave me a positive feedback for them, so they were made immediately after that. Then I worked on the bullets, then the roses for the HUD and the portraits. Curiously, the last asset to be made in the LD38 was the roses and their visual effect, which I did in like one hour, if I remember things correctly. It was pretty much a last-minute effort because we didn't think of this mechanic properly until the event was almost over.

Even the grain effect and the gradients were done in Adobe Illustrator. I'm fairly confident in my vector art skills to say that it was actually an easy job to do most of the decisions and the art itself. Most of my limitations were in terms of hardware at the time.

This trailer was made shortly after the LD38 event,

and was teasing a version that was used in some local events and was also shown to some potential investors, and while we didn't have much success with the later, the game itself received some very positive attention from everyone who played it in competitions and casual events.

Sadly, some assets I've done never made it into the game.

Mostly menus and things like that. Asteroid selection, options and a main menu that was a "literal" asteroid which would rotate to show each different option, such as Begin Game, Options, Credits etc. We stopped the game's development just before those were added because of a myriad of problems, which were of great value anyway for everyone in the team to learn from our mistakes and, after the project, grow out of them.

and some rough pencil sketches:

The animation below is a mockup of the Main Menu as seen from afar

The camera would close it's view in the top object, just like in the previous images. The asteroid would rotate when the left-right keys were pressed and when the camera stops the animations seen in the video would play.