New Brute Design

The Brute is a rocket shooting heavy hitter. He’s got a ton of armor and deals a ton of damage.  If you run in too close for a shotgun blast, he swipes at you with a devastating melee attack.

I’m a big fan of constantly iterating on things and this is the fourth design for the Brute. The original design was green and tended to blend into the environments (environments are generally cool colors and enemies are warm colors with black/white.)

Here is a look at the evolution of the Brute’s Design:

I’m a big believer that visual design should always communicate gameplay. A bad-ass looking design is good, but a design that helps the player understand the enemy is much, much better.

The Brute design needed to communicate: Heavy armor, shoots rockets, devastating melee attack, slow moving. All this, and it needs to look cool.

A) Man, this was brutal. I knew I wanted a large head and oversized hands in the design, but this one just came out looking like a Big Daddy reject from Bioshock with no elbows.

The design was so bad that I didn’t even animate it after I tested it in the game. I just moved onto the next design.

Looking back now, it just makes me cringe.

B) This design stuck around for a long time. The Brute launched shots from his palm, Iron Man style. At the time, the colors for Bunker Punks were very brown and desaturated and this design represented that.

It did look like a lumbering, heavily armored threat, but the rounded design made it feel less intimidating than I wanted.

C) I added a rocket launcher arm, made the legs more spindly and made sure they weren’t obscured by the arms. The subtle addition of the sensors on the face also helped give the Brute more appeal. 

I thought this was the final design, but then I did a pass on environments and decided that environments would be cool colors (Green/Blue) in mid-level saturation. This made the design blend into the environments a lot more than I wanted. 

I want the player to come into a room, see the Brute and realize they are in for a fight. With the green design, they’d identify the other threats first and then spot the Brute.

D) This is the current design and I’m really happy with it.  The white body pops on all levels where the Brute appears. The legs are a warm color, which helps identify them as a threat. It also includes the glowing surveillance eye that all enemy units have.