We wanted to share some more concept art of our game, Horseless Headman! The early ideation period is the most fun because anything goes but as we whittle down a project some things unfortunately need to get axed.

The game and character were originally going to be in full color, but for sake of time and readability we decided to go with a simpler palette.

It's fun to see what else survived in unexpected ways! The tiny king reveal still made it to final. Though unfortunately some enemy ideas had to be cut.

From the very beginning we wanted a fun reveal of the main character being two different entities. Here's the first initial sketch of the reveal:

The idea of the character spinning the head like a staff came after we figured out the spinning horse head mechanic in game, and that's how it was portrayed in the intro cutscene.

Rough sketch:

Final:

Fun fact about the animation, everything was broken up into pieces so we can reuse as many assets as possible to save on time, here is an example:

(the ball is subtle lore implications lol)

But this technique was used a lot to help us save on time, and it was also used quite a bit in conjunction with traditional hand-drawn animation in the intro too!

Hope you enjoyed reading!
As always you can play our game, Horseless Headman here: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/horseless-headman

-Swan and Boat