This is a beat 'em up game available on Steam where you cooperate with other players to fight against robots, charging up powerful moves as you do so. One of my jobs for this project was to create the arena where players battle in the game, and you can see an overview of the level down below.
References
This project's art style focused on a cyber aesthetic with vibrant colours. Because of this, I looked up some that I believed fit the style of this game. The mood board below shows different references I collected to help visualize what the arena should look like. The main things I looked for were colours, modularity and the overall structure of the arena.
2D Map & Blockouts
With the focus of the game being primarily on the flashy moves and animations, we needed to have a very simple arena that gave the players enough space to move around while still allowing them to strategize where to move. Players can stay in the center of the arena, though they may get swarmed by enemies if they do. Otherwise they can move behind the pillars to lure in just a couple of enemies, though the pillars may block their view of other enemies coming in. This design encourages players to consistently move around the arena if they want to defeat enemies without being overwhelmed. And while playing co-op, it encourages teammates to move to different spaces of the map to cover each other.
With the map done, I created a rough blockout of the arena, also showing our chosen colour scheme. There's also a rough recolour made by another artist on the team to further map down the final look of the level. Because the arena itself is fairly simple, not many changes outside of size adjustments were necessary.
Blockout
Artist Recolour