A Game Art Development Story

by Seth Dranes, Lead Artist at bencinStudios

As lead artist on Lucky Lotto Match, a new mobile matching game for Android and iOS devices, I wanted to share my experiences as we worked to bring this game, its characters, and its world to life. As the only artist working on the project, I started off by getting in contact with Dennis, Lucky Lotto Match's creator.  Dennis was very clear with what he wanted, so we didn’t have to spend too much time coming up with early concepts.

The game pieces were the first thing I decided to tackle. The pieces would change as production went on, originally including a mix of items and animals, including a horseshoe, a cornucopia, an emerald, and a four-leaf clover, with only the Neko Cat and Dolphin pieces having been there since the beginning.  The lineup was eventually decided to be animal-focused, while some of the original pieces would become power ups (Horseshoe and Emerald).

After the game pieces, I went straight into backgrounds, as I wanted to tackle what I believed was the hardest task next. Dennis had stated he wanted the backgrounds to be Italy themed. Of course, I picked some famous landmarks (Leaning Tower, Colosseum), but I also didn’t want to go with all the obvious choices. I picked North Tyrol and Palermo specifically to add some uniqueness to the locations. The difficulty the backgrounds brought me was the amount of time each one took. I had initially anticipated a much simpler style and on my initial estimate, I figured I could finish two or three backgrounds a day, where as in reality, I was finishing ONE background every day or two. Patience was the key, as it was very easy to get frustrated with myself when I ran into any hiccups.

The last big challenge was the map backgrounds. I wanted to give the feeling of a pathway to follow without ACTUALLY putting a pathway in every illustration. I had also misread the dimensions for the maps, but by the time I learned this, I was already finished with them! This created an interesting challenge, as not only did I have to add more to the drawing to make sure there was no stretching, but I also had to figure out a way to link the maps together for scrolling through them. Luckily, since I chose the harder stuff first (on purpose), the rest of the project was pretty smooth sailing.

I continued to get Dennis’s input on things like power ups, bombs, block pieces, and other game mechanics, and those were fairly easy to tackle. For the UI, I really didn’t want to be messaging the client every few minutes asking him if each asset looked alright. (Each individual asset took anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, depending on detail.) Instead, I decided to tackle the UI on my own, and instead, have him pick the ones he wanted to change after they were all done.  Since the theme of the game was luck and lottery winnings, there was a heavy amount of gold used.  I decided on purple as a secondary complimentary color and went with that for the color scheme of the UI. After completing that, we took care of any additional assets (Title screen, Fortuna animations, etc.).

So there you have it.  Hopefully you’ve got a better idea of my thoughts and processes as I moved through the design and development process.  You can get Lucky Lotto Match now on the App Store and Google Play Store now.