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Interested in hearing more about our upcoming title, Captain Toonhead? We’ll give you a sneak peek on the rationale behind our towers, weapons, enemies and more as we prepare for our blast-off in 2021!

First up in our series: Lady Jubilee, the first tower (or toonret) that we designed.

We aimed to achieve a wacky look & feel heavily influenced by Saturday morning cartoons that later will guide the execution of the other toonrets. We created these toonrets to have a lot of character, because we want them to be more than just technological devices; but also be a reflection of our main character (Elliott) and his fun personality, his love for TV, his awesome inventor skills, and his over-the-top sense of humor. Since the game is played in first-person, you don’t see yourself a lot; so all of his creations are, apart from their correspondent gameplay roles, tools for understanding Captain Toonhead’s persona.

The inspiration behind this design was a combination Wile E. Coyote’s irresponsible use of fireworks; mixed with X-men’s Jubilee cheerful personality. This is a classic single target damage (DMG) tower, so we knew we needed discernible projectiles that are clearly intended for hurting enemies while still being as perky & fun as we want our game to be. We think few things are simultaneously as cheerful and dangerous as a bottle rocket flying at your face; and since Elliott is a cartoon enthusiast, we just looked for the most iconic fireworks references we could find in cartoons we love since we were kids.  

Concerning the overall shape of the toonret, you will see that all of them follow the same structure, which was also resolved with Lady Jubilee’s design. Some key characteristics are:

  1. Toonrets are tall with empty space in the center: Since our Tower Defense is in first-person, we need the towers’ details to read mostly vertically. Also, since the player is teleporting from tower to tower, we need them to be able to fit the standing PC within them.
  2. Toonrets have a shooting head: All toonrets shoot from the top, so all their projectiles are spawned higher than the average height of enemies, in order to diminish visual clutter in the player’s line of sight and support the ToonRide’s elevated point of view. Additionally, most of the characteristic features are condensed in their upper part of the Toonrets, so their type is easier to identify not only in the distance but also from above when in eagle view mode.  These decisions also translate into some sort of anthropomorphic shape for the toonrets. These provide an upper section that holds the most identifiable features, that unconsciously reads like some sort of head/face, which helps a lot for conveying a personality in these objects.
  3. Toonrets are bright and moving: All toonrets have identifiable shapes, bright colors and idle animations that make them pop up instantly from the backgrounds. The player needs these towers for teleporting and building defensive strategies very quickly, so there shouldn’t be any doubt where your toonrets are and which type they are.

We’re looking forward to your own thoughts and experiences with Lady Jubilee when Captain Toonhead launches!

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