Character Design

“During our early stage of development it was very important to know what we wanted to do for the enemies, and since our inspiration was the game Superhot we were thinking of something that had a shattering effect when an enemy was killed. We brainstormed an idea for a design that we thought could look really appealing and have the shattering effect, then we  found a lightbulb quite literally, encompassed what we were thinking of. The idea of having the enemies with lightbulbs for heads was one of our first ideas we came up with, that way we could have lighting come from their heads as well as having variations of lengths and sizes and styles of bulbs. Now that we had some ideas down, we also needed a theme. We had a variety of different ideas for themes, spitballing them for a while, and got drawn to the visual identity of having a very neon theme and style. We ended up  drawing a lot of inspiration from Hotline Miami, but decided to take it from Miami and go to Japan, settling on a 70’s and 80’s aesthetic. Since we were basing it in 80’s Japan, we did a bit of research on the styles and cultures to base the design from, and of course one of the first things to come to mind was a yakuza as one of the enemies. Being both a boss and a regular pawn of the yakuza were perfect for the game but we wanted another enemy too, and after researching further we settled on the yankee culture, usually associated with delinquents, so it was pretty fitting to have them as an enemy in the game.” - Jackson (2D artist, previous Art Lead)

Here are some of the main pictures that drove the inspiration behind our characters: