Between June 2021 and January 2023 I was the Head of Design for the mobile game company Zeedz. I developed the distinctive style and visual language and lead a team of international artists overlooking and contributing to all visuals of the brand and game.
Explorations and Development
Since the game was built from the ground up, there was a broad visual exploration phase for figuring out style, gameplay, worlds and story. The main idea of the game was collecting and planting little "Zeedle" characters and to "evolve" them.
Characters
For the "collectable" aspect of the game we wanted to design simple but recognisable characters inspired by all kinds of plants that were "evolvable", turning from little "Zeed" creatures into bigger "Zeedles" and eventually evolving into bigger shapes and forms when leveled up.
Art Direction and Drawovers
As all artist were working remotely from all over the world a lot of communication happened via drawovers to find and later fine-tune the style of the game and world. To keep the style consistent, I created a style guide early on including not only distinctive shapes and colours but also used design principles, examples and photoshop tricks to make the look accessible for all involved artist and to make sure the style was feeling consistent.
Later the style guide was extended to props and environments as well as splash art.
