Game On: Art: Boss Monster

For the Boss Monster to fit in the Arena, she would have to look sick and taken over by mushrooms and rot. He design would have to be scary and aggressive, but at the same time it would have to reflect the fact she is a victim herself and sick from the corruption.

I put together a mood board first, where I found even more interesting types of mushroom I could use.

I had sketched some ideas beforehand, while working on the battle arena. I found a photo of the "ink mushroom" when putting together the moodboard, which inspired the idea of a veil hiding her disfigured face, only the eye, her weak point, being visible.

I also sketched out some gestural drawings to understand how the character would move and get a feeling of her personality: she would be very quick, gliding above the ground and dashing at the player.

I then drew some iterations, as I still wanted to explore different concepts. I had an idea of the witch having overgrown when she got corrupted, being stuck in her house. It generated the interesting design on the far right, which I absolutely love, but wouldn't have worked in the context of limited underground space, as the character would be huge and wouldn't have space to move.

I ended up going with the first option and iterated on that, drawing inspiration from the different types of mushrooms I found.

Since I wasn't really sure which one to choose, I took the ones I liked most (1,3, 9 and 8) and detailed them.

The second and last ones weren't aggressive enough, while the third one wasn't clear enough, as you can't see the details on the face properly. So I went with the first one. I wasn't completely convinced about the horns though, so I made some more sketches of that.

I also detailed the ones I liked the most, adding some ornaments. In the end, I chose the third one as it conveys the Slavic monster image I was going for the best.

I sculpted the character in ZBrush, then sent it to Photoshop using the Zbrush to Photoshop plugin. I am really happy with how the sculpt turned out, as it already had a good level of detail. making my job easier.