Last of the bunch

So here is the last of my art dump for Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze! I hope you've enjoyed taking a look at it! There is so much that goes into the art of a video game. There is even more I wish I could share, but I think it's better experienced in the game! Also I've tried to share the contributes of every artist on each scene, but I want to emphasize that art in video games is rarely ever made by just one person. It passes through many talented hands on it's way to the store shelf. I work with an immensely talented team at Retro and we all worked together to bring the best game possible to the fans!

This is the diorama that is representational of the Autumn Heights level. I worked with an animator to come with the composition and poses for the characters in the scene. The Autumn Heights island is very near and dear to me. I developed a large part of the look for the island and worked on 4 of the levels themselves. In this scene the owl statues were modeled and textured by Sean Horton, and the grass and tree canopy were also created by another artist.

Just a small sample of the props I created for the game. Among my proudest is creating the HD version of Donkey Kongs Rocket Barrel! I also got to create the easter egg of one Bowsers tanks from Super Mario Bros. 3! The barrel was created for use as the Barrel Cannon but we ended up going with a different version. This version ended up just being used as a background prop. 

This level was great fun because it is the only boss level in the game that has 3 different locations! For the main area I used the temple I created for Rodent Ruckus in the background, and fleshed it out. The Owl statues in the background were created by Sean Horton. For whatever reason they weren't used in any of the levels but I loved them so I had to put them in here. I imagined that there was a society of owls long ago that populated the Autumn Heights island. This is why Skowl was able to take over so easily. He used the Folklore as a pretense for the Snomad invasion of the island.

For the Second level (not pictured) I had to come up with a look for the Massive pine tree. It was tricky to make something that was able to run in game, look stylized yet still read as pine needles. The third level has nothing that I contributed to (besides the textures on the platform you stand on) but our technical artist Rob, and lighting artist Brad did an amazing job with the clouds and mood of the scene.