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Peridot
Niantic, 2018-2022
Art Director
Niantic entrusted the design of its 2nd original IP to me and it was a pleasure to create this colorful, trippy & happy world of Peridots with my team. I had the opportunity to hire and guide a wonderful team of designers on a project where the human world and the Peridot world overlapped in fun and sometimes unexpected ways. We had the honor of creating the world of the "Dots"- from the creatures to foods and items, all the way to the UI, Marketing, trailers, swag & even dot Plushies!
Creature Design
The creatures in Peridot are required to carry quite a heavy load. Not only do the creatures need to be lovable enough for a tomagatchi and unique enough to be instantly recognizable as a new IP, but the creatures also needed to support a procedural generation system. With these things in mind, we went through many rounds of creature concept variations until finding the exact right balance of graphical abstraction with soft lines. The result was a unique and magical creature with infinite procedural possibilities.
...lovable enough for a tomagatchi...
Design Process ...
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We lived in the land of napkin sketches for a while as we tried to figure out what kind of creature we wanted for this new IP: biped vs quadraped, floating vs flying vs walking vs hopping, detail vs simplicity and most importantly, STORY.
Technical limitations were also something we were needing to consider as we were dreaming up our world, so as we went through various designs, we were measuring them up against the technical considerations and goalposts.
...PS. Have fun moving, scaling and rotating the below images... :)
Initial Creature Design...
After many many iterations and rough prototypes, we concluded that, as with many things, the simpler, the better. When dealing with AR on mobile, we found that more important than technical accuracy, is the"feeling" of the experience. As long as the creatures and gameplay are engaging and joyous, technical inaccuracy can be somewhat overlooked by the players. As we moved toward graphical simplicity, we found people had a stronger positive reaction and it gave us the opportunity to establish a look that could be remarkable as a new IP.
Below are the first few concept variations of the initial Dot design. It was clear with this design that the simple flowing shape of the body, the small feet, the face mask, and the 2 sets of ears, were going to be defining characteristics of this creature species:
Creature Variation...
Materials, Patterns and Gradients
In order. to get an idea of what variation could mean, I started to set up a range of potential genetic variation concepts to sell the idea of one globally used base mesh, with procedural face masks, ears, eyes, plumage, tails and horns, materials, textures and stacking patterns. Here are some variation explorations:
Nudibranchs were the original source of inspiration for us, in terms of shape and proportion differentiation. The base shapes of Nudibranchs are generally similar, but the "plumage", color and patterns they display can vary dramatically. We wanted this to be the foundation of our designs. Limiting the base shapes and allowing the variation/procedural generation to be found in the plumage, colors, patterns, materials, horns, ears and face shapes let us have unlimited variation but with quality that we could somewhat control.
Shape Differentiation
Nudibranchs... similar base, varying characteristics
Archetypes
With the building blocks of the creature shapes and characteristics planned out, we were able to start building archetypes around these rules. In order to sell the idea for how we wanted the procedural generation to work, as well as how building the brand of this IP would ultimately play out, I created a set of concepts that illustrated our ultimate goal.
...Dot Foods
We went through several ideas for food for the Peridots. We initially settled on simple creatures that closer resembled micro-organisms than other animals. It didn't feel right to the dev team that the Dots ate other animals, so our initial designs resembled things like insects, mitochondria or flowers.
V1
Ultimately, we decided the Dots were indeed vegetarian and we created foods according to the semantic channels where they are found. We wanted them to be similar to something you might see in the real world, but looked like it could have come from another dimensional layer on top of the real world... just a tiny twist of difference in the look. The Dots themselves drove the simplicity in shape of the foods. We chose proportions that were abundant and ripe in feeling to mimic the warmth of the Dots and the Dot world and colors that were candy-like. See a small selection below.
*Credit: Carrie Sloan- Concept Designs with myself Art Directing and Final Rendering.
V2
Credit: Collab with several artists
When UI is in AR...
The UX and UI strategy for the game was particularly challenging. One of the tentpoles of the game was for the experience to be fully in AR, However, after extensive user testing, we found that cognitive breaks were needed by the players when playing in AR. We utilized 2d screens mixed in with 3D space screens to keep the cognitive load as low as possible but the engaging and organic feeling alive. Our goal was at least 5 minutes of consecutive gameplay in AR and with this method, we were able to get above 20min consecutive gameplay in AR.
We separated the worlds into 2: the "Human world"- where the player grabs their backpack, journal, & lunchboxand sets out on a journey with their Peridot. And the "Peridot World", where the foods, items, and Peridots live in all of their colorful glory - a world layered on top of the human world.
Human World
Credit: Collab with Mat Gilson
Credit: Arnel Ramac
Journal & UI
The story we are telling in this game one of a "Keeper" who is helping to care for and support the growth of the Peridot Species. We wanted the feeling to be that of a nature lover and their journal capturing information about the Peridot species. With that in mind, we knew we wanted the main UI to be reminiscent of the pages of a journal. Most importantly, we wanted to keep a clean feel to the UI without sacrificing fun.
Credit: Collab with Daiga Shinohara & Susan Kare
Iconography
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Credit: Susan Kare- Iconography
Marketing & Fun Explorations
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