Occasionally, XBLA Fans likes to take a backseat and allow members of the development community to speak openly and directly to our readers. After all, you came here to read about games, and who better to talk about them than the professionals who create them? With that in mind, please enjoy the following article written by Enigma Software CEO Daniel Parente.

In our first Alien Spidy post, we showed how we took the initial concept for our protagonist, Spidy, and made him into the lovable character he is today –- despite being a spider!

In today’s post, we want to do something similar. We’re introducing the remaining cast of characters featured in the game and how we came up with consistent visuals to keep the art direction and, of course, Spidy himself in line with our vision.

Let’s start with the Ladybug, which has its own unique charm.

In our previous post, we took you through the design process for creating an interesting and engaging lead character. The final character designs didn’t happen on the first attempt, but after a lot of input and discussion from the team we were able to fine tune the initial concept and come up with a character who represented our vision for Spidy. So now that we had our lead, we needed a supporting cast to make him shine! We started to play around with several concepts of the Ladybug, based on the artistic lines that we know were working with Spidy.

Once we had the first concepts down, we fine-tuned.

And we fine-tuned some more…

Until, at last, we came up with the final version for our Ladybug.

To create original characters that are actually pleasing to look at and that players can engage with is not easy. It requires a huge amount of work and talent and is a time-consuming process but one required to guarantee the quality of the characters set to be used in the game.

The same design process was applied to the other insects in the game, like the Mosquito.

Until we finished up with the following final design.

We also wanted to bring to life as many creatures as we could that could inhabit the environments we had planned for the game. Here are a few examples of the other creatures you will find in Alien Spidy.

Initially, we only intended to have Earth creatures in the game, but then we thought it would be interesting to look at a similar concept as Men in Black and have some alien characters that have infiltrated Earth with a hidden plot to conquer the planet. So we started to play around with alien character designs that enhanced not only enhanced the already stunning visuals, but also the gameplay.

Here are some examples:

Designing characters for a videogame is a very important element and, together with gameplay and environments, was one of our key factors in the overall success of the game. It’s one of the first things the player will evaluate and critique, so for a game creator with a sound respect for his fellow gamers, it’s a vital task that needs to be accomplished with the best intentions, talent and execution.

Thanks for letting us share our artistic design process with you; we hope you have enjoyed this latest update from the Enigma SP studios.