You're a goblin gladiator on a post-humans Earth and you need to kick, throw, and shoot your way to victory in the goblin arenas. Gobsmacked was the first title I made with my friend Ash Peter under our banner, Ash & Adam's Games. The game is exceedingly fast paced - our guiding phrase was "ride 60 seconds of chaos" - so I needed to craft an art style that was highly readable at a glance. Bold colors, punchy silhouettes, and an overall janky aesthetic helped everything feel playfully obnoxious while efficiently communicating the nouns and verbs of play. And by keeping the models relatively low poly, designing a common material in Substance Designer that every object used as a base, and authoring shaders that helped unify all the art in-game, our production cycle was able to move at a brisk pace.
Videos
Images
An in-game shot of Gobsmacked.
A collection of concept images from the design pass of the player character.
A collection of images from our visual design and mockup process on Gobsmacked.
Working sketches from when we designed our arena tech. A base 'ground plate' gets selected at random, and is then populated by 'structures' of different sizes at predefined locations.
A shot of how the arena tech worked in practice. Structures were made of Parts, which were then placed procedurally on a Ground Plate.
The first-person hand assets from Gobsmacked. This is one of the only assets that used a normal map.
The crossbow from Gobsmacked. We decided early on that the weapons should look like little characters themselves.
The grenade launcher from Gobsmacked. This is a bike-pump PVC cannon that shoots tennis ball bombs. I usually call it the dog gun.
The flamesprayer from Gobsmacked; a tiny, handheld dragon.
The shader I authored uses vertex colors to control the outline shell, and has roughness, metallic, and emission packed into the RGB of a mask texture. Combine these with a tweaked lighting model and you get the technical foundation that supported our art style.
The bucket gun from Gobsmacked. We decided our enemies should always be comprised of identifiable parts, and that those parts should lean towards being junky.
The traffic cone gunner. Like the weapons, the goblins try to make their turrets look like little creatures.
The game technically takes place in Italy, and this flier us made primarily of an old Fiat wheel.
The sky shader worked with the fog color to ensure a colorful wash over each arena that was created by our procedural arena system.
I favored big, bold shapes, colors, and placing elements at a slight angle to keep the UIs feeling energetic. The players first person hand was used as a pointer instead of a traditional cursor.
Icons from the various upgrades and unlocks from Gobsmacked. Big, bold, and slightly janky, just like the rest of the game's look.
An in-game screenshot from Gobsmacked. The explosions in the break apart the structures, adding to the chaos.
An in-game screenshot from Gobsmacked that shows the mode that unlocks after beating the game, 'The Gauntlet'. It was framed as a illegal arena circuit that took place at night.
An in-game screenshot from Gobsmacked featuring goblin caesar.
