Making the monkey and being terrified doing it
Whoa, hey! Usually it’s Ed with the mic on here, but it’s my turn to talk… about drawing pictures! Specifically, drawing pictures of monkeys!
(photo from Ebay)
When we started making OFFBEAT, we were worried we wouldn’t have anything mascot-worthy to capture the attention of Steam-scrolling musicians-to-be. There’s something important in designing key art that I (with much disgust) call the “Mr Beast Effect”. Players tend to click on the thumbnails that have a prominent face in them. How were we going to give a keyboard or a guitar pedal a face?
As it turns out, very easily. One thing we all failed to consider is that the challenge would be in stopping me from making absolutely everything into a Silly Little Guy. Looking back at pre-cat-piano times, it seems absurd that we were worried about this. But we were! So, we turned to the infamous 1950s monkey toy.
Like many people, I find this thing to be a horrific and somewhat repulsive beast. I knew I needed to really chisel away at it to get away from the scariness, and closer to its potential as a representation of chaotic fun. Here’s how I got there:
I started with a 10 minute sketch, purely following instinct. I just wanted to get an idea of mania down in the expression and movement. Although this initial sketch is tame compared to what comes later, I think it achieves that.
After collecting a bunch of references images, I started on the bulk of the concept art. I used the word “chisel” earlier because it really does feel like that; I start with quantity and speed, and then we tune it from there. The goal is to get a big variety to pick and choose features from. Out of this early batch, I feel greatly endeared to monkey 15, but he was definitely not right for what we wanted to portray in this game.
Then, we narrowed down the design. In the end, we went for a sort of punk-clown hybrid, merging ideas I had from monkeys 6, 8 and 10. There was a lot of back-and-forth with both my Whetstone teammates and our marketing wizard friends at Pantaloon at this stage. Something important to establish was that viewers needed to be able to tell straight away that the monkey is 1) music related, 2) a toy, 3) a bit counter-culture. With this in mind, we eventually agreed on the design’s colours and details, and the monkey as you know it was born!
In a sandwich-kind-of-way, I then ended the whole process with a 30 minute sketch of the newly realised design, again to just get the feeling of chaos I wanted to express down on (digital) paper.
This sketch then became important, because it went into the key art brief that I helped put together. You may be wondering why a brief was needed, if I made the key art. Initially I wasn’t going to. The wonderful Freddy, who did an incredible job on the logo, was the first choice to do this, but had to pull out to focus on another project.
I mention this, because Pantaloon asked me if I wanted them to find someone else to do the key art, or if I wanted to do the key art. This scared me a lot. Freddy is an amazing artist with credits on some insane projects, and OFFBEAT is my first big, long-term project. I felt like the shoes were too big for me to fill. On a call with Ed, I started listing out the pros and cons of me doing the key art. In the end, the only con I could really come up with was “I am nervous”. Ed pointed out that that’s not really enough of a reason to pass the job to someone else. So I got started on a thumbnail. This is what I came up with after 30 minutes:
You can see my mixed-font idea that eventually became the logo here, interestingly. After approval, I started sketching. Once I started, it was hard to stop. A lot of this piece was done standing up on the tube. I had so much fun painting it. I think I was missing doing really gestural drawing after doing pixel art (on my mouse) for so long. I also went bananas (haha) on the textures.
When the base painting was done, I took it out of Procreate (my beloved) and brought it into Photoshop, and added a bunch of collage elements. Some fun tidbits about them:
The eye is our programming mastermind Ivan’s. He was a very good sport about this.
A lot of the background textures are screenshots of Ed’s work in Pure Data, which is what we use for the game’s audio backend. (You can read his blog post about it on this website!) I just think it looks so cool. You can see the patches for gnome and some other things if you look carefully!
Some of the other background textures are from some old opensource Yamaha synth manuals. Archive.org is an absolute gem of a resource.
I was complaining to my girlfriend that I couldn’t find any good free images of a cymbal’s underbelly online, while we were on a walk. Just as I said it, we went past a shop with a drumkit in the window. I have walked past that shop endless times and it was never there until that day. We were floored. I got a great photo that you can now see the monkey holding.
And then, it was ready! In retrospect, I’m not sure why I was so nervous. All the game art is as public-facing as the key art. I just felt intimidated. The thing that sucks about being inexperienced is that you can only get experience by doing things you aren’t confident in. Confidence comes later, I think. (I hope!). You just have to do things scared. Drawing a monkey shouldn’t be scary, but it honestly was, for me! Sometimes, it pays to be brave. You never know when you might have fun and end up with a crazy looking monkey at the end of it.
If you want to see more of the art in the game, don’t forget to play it on Steam!
