Alien Shepherd

Alien Shepherd is a challenging precision-platformer with a flying mechanic that can be activated by fusioning with a pet Jellyfish.

You lost one of your sheep and must find it before the sun rises. On your way, you will meet a flying jellyfish that will help you in your quest. You will go through challenging levels and understand why the world is filled with mushrooms and deadly robots.

For the courageous, some star shards can be found in the world. But be assured that they are not easy to reach.

It took us approximately 1 year and a half to develop this game. At the beginning we were a team of two people, my brother (the developer) and me (the artist) . Our main objective was to finish a game in one year from start to finish and make it enjoyable to play. But as we wandered in the depth of game designing we realized we needed helpers and we ended being a team of 7.

The first step of my creative process was sketching. It helped me have ideas about which story we were going to tell. We first thought of the love story between a space princess who would have to go and rescue her prince. In the sketching phase the prince turned himself into another princess who ended up being a sheep and our protagonist an alien shepherd.

It was my first time doing pixel art and the style changed a lot during this year of development. Firstly I wanted to create a complex pixel art style because I thought it would be much cooler and impressive, but it ended up being messy and difficult to read. So I started to simplify.

Here are some final pixel art assets you can find in game !

Now to give a good comparison I’ll show you some of the first assets I made. I think it’s important to show these, because even though I am now terrified by the way they look, they are part of the process and it helped me understand that when you work in the gaming industry there's a lot of concepts that will never be used in the final product and that is completely normal.

As we decided to release Alien Shepherd on Steam, I had to create all sorts of visuals for that purpose : illustrations, achievements icons, capsules,...