NPC
THE CULINARY COALITION
Culinary Coalition, is a top-down bullet hell cooking game, where you play as a young man in a chef costume who was mistaken by aliens for a real chef and abducted on Halloween night. Taken prisoner in a space arena, you must dash, dodge and deep fry your way through this deadly cooking game show to please the alien food critics.
As you play through the game you encounter little aliens that live on different planets. You can read all about how they came to be on this page.
THE CULINARY COALITION
NPC
'Culinary Coalition' is a top-down cooking bullet-hell you play as a young man in a chef costume who was mistaken by aliens for a real chef and abducted on Halloween night. Taken prisoner in a space arena, you must dash, dodge and deep fry your way through this deadly cooking game show to please the alien food critics.
As you go through the game, you get a chance to chat with some NPCs, and have them cheer you on in the arena.
The beginning
During pre-production I was assigned with doing the concept art for these characters. My initial inspiration were frogs or minions. After discussion with my teammates, we all thought about how we could use oven mitts as an inspiration, as it tied in well with our theme, and to to that I iterated on silhouette #3 from the image shown on the left.
As we progressed on our project, we decided on 4 different biomes. The first biome I started working on was called 'Lysus', which is a planet shaped like a watermelon, with bright red rivers made of watermelon juice. This ultimately decided the skin-tone of our little aliens. There were two favourites from the batch, but the oven mitt design appeared to be adored by all teammates and lecturers guiding us through the project, so of course we had to proceed with that design.
As soon as everyone was happy with the silhouette, I work on the orthograph to help myself model these cute little creatures.
With these aliens almost acting like they were within their tribes living on different planets, I wanted to make that obvious with different patterns that were complementary to the rest of the colours and were also representative of the planet. With this design specifically, all the white stripes are meant to mimic the stripes of a watermelon.
The fun part of course was the texturing! I enjoyed this process the most, as it meant the NPC was finally coming to life.
Once the design was done, I had moved on to sculpting, UVs, and retopology.
Final lysus design
Once the main silhouette design was done, I moved on to making the designs for the rest of the biomes, starting with the next level - Cremon. The inhabitants of the next planet lived in a cold desert, made entirely of dessert. The sand was vanilla ice cream, and the palm trees were made of wafer sticks for their tree stumps, and rock candy leaves.
I especially struggled with the colour scheme for this NPC, as I kept gravitating towards the colours of the planet, which were yellow and blue. This however made the NPC appear sickly, I couldn't get his skin tone right at all. Thankfully, after many trials with different colour, a light pink skin tone felt right.
I wanted to inspire myself by the crazy colours of candy and rainbow swirl ice creams, but of course that would make the colours too intense. I decided to leave the trace of that in the patterns around the aliens face. It almost ended up looking like a blue ice cream alien with some smarties on his face and back.
Final lysus design
As we progressed on our project, we decided on 4 different biomes. The first biome I started working on was called 'Lysus', which is a planet shaped like a watermelon, with bright red rivers made of watermelon juice. This ultimately decided the skin-tone of our little aliens. There were two favourites from the batch, but the oven mitt design appeared to be adored by all teammates and lecturers guiding us through the project, so of course we had to proceed with that design.
During pre-production I was assigned with doing the concept art for these characters. My initial inspiration were frogs or minions. After discussion with my teammates, we all thought about how we could use oven mitts as an inspiration, as it tied in well with our theme, and to to that I iterated on silhouette #3 from the image shown on the left.
As soon as everyone was happy with the silhouette, I work on the orthograph to help myself model these cute little creatures.
With these aliens almost acting like they were within their tribes living on different planets, I wanted to make that obvious with different patterns that were complementary to the rest of the colours and were also representative of the planet. With this design specifically, all the white stripes are meant to mimic the stripes of a watermelon.
Once the design was done, I had moved on to sculpting, UVs, and retopology.
The fun part of course was the texturing! I enjoyed this process the most, as it meant the NPC was finally coming to life.
lysus
Once the main silhouette design was done, I moved on to making the designs for the rest of the biomes, starting with the next level - Cremon. The inhabitants of the next planet lived in a cold desert, made entirely of dessert. The sand was vanilla ice cream, and the palm trees were made of wafer sticks for their tree stumps, and rock candy leaves.
I especially struggled with the colour scheme for this NPC, as I kept gravitating towards the colours of the planet, which were yellow and blue. This however made the NPC appear sickly, I couldn't get his skin tone right at all. Thankfully, after many trials with different colour, a light pink skin tone felt right.
I wanted to inspire myself by the crazy colours of candy and rainbow swirl ice creams, but of course that would make the colours too intense. I decided to leave the trace of that in the patterns around the aliens face. It almost ended up looking like a blue ice cream alien with some smarties on his face and back.
cremon
The next planet to tackle the design of was Greasopolis - life for the aliens on the planet is fast paced, as is the food.
I wanted to use popular colours in fast food chains and restaurants for the colour scheme of these aliens, and I knew going into this that I had to use orange one way or another. The colour is used to induce hunger, and so I thought it was very appropriate for this specific type of alien.
The three dark orange lines are meant to represent the stacking of food together, like a sandwich or a burger.
greasopolis
Chiloo - the final planet, where the aliens are obsessed with spicy foods. Of course I took inspiration from hot sauce for the design, and other things like spicy pepperoni pizza. This design was the easiest for me to come up with and felt most intuitive to design, as the colours used to communicate that something is spicy are warm reds. For the skin tone of this villager I was actually inspired by grease that spicy food often has around it. I avoided using extremely bright colours as it would completely throw things off, and so although the main body is not a bright red, it has the right amount of saturation to remind you of the spicy sauce you might dip your nachos into.
chiloo
in-game look
Here's a peak at what the NPCs look like in the game and where they appear!
the arena
the hub
promotional renders
