Designing Cute Cars

Balanced Worlds has recently announced Kart Buddies, our next game extending the Buddies brand. Please support us by "Liking" us on Facebook. We make casual-core 3D freemium games inspired by games we grew up playing. Albeit our games are on the kiddie side, but making games for (E)veryone is what we love to do.

Here are some concepts I did to get into the groove of things. Designing cars is a highly specialized skill and I have much to learn (as always). FYI, the cooper inspired one was started by my lead artist but I ended up doing some corrections then coloring it.

PS3 Move - Something a little more technical

Here is something for those who enjoy something a bit more technical. Early on, before the PS3 Move was released, the team I was working with were trying to come up with some crazy attachment peripheral ideas for the PS3 Move. I thought these ideas looked fun, simply plug and play, but I can imagine they'd be easier to lose than your TV remote. Fun but not a good idea:).

Ratchet and Clank Ideation Sketches - 11 years late but still worth the wait

I recently had the time to go through my piles of Ratchet and Clank ideation sketches so that I can digitally archive them. I know it's like 11 years late but scanning each one of them in would take a significant amount of time. So after a decade of waiting I figured now's as good a time as any to take pictures of them, now that digital cameras exist. Below is the final Clank design. He's been through a pretty rigorous iterative process to get to this point.

Check out the updated Ratchet and Clank section of my website to see how Clank came to be.You'll also see a bunch more concepts and ideation sketches that helped shape the tone of the franchise. These sketches have never been seen outside the walls of Insomniac Games, other than a few class lectures and some folks at Sony, no one else has ever seen these... my fault for keeping them all to myself:).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy seeing these as much as I enjoyed creating them.

Cheers!

John