From the archives

Today we have some recently declassified concepts for a project from the good folks at Villian LLC.

Character design for games is always a tricky affair because there's a balance between tech and aesthetics that must always be watched. This becomes even more pronounced when the game is for the iPhone. Fortunately, with a strong AD, as they have in Tim Nice, it's possible to find a middle ground between being shackled by poly counts and joint limitations, and the crazy machinations of the concept artist ( what if we put rocketpacks on their feet and they could jump all over the place??)

some human trooper armor

and some crazy aliens

the tech restrictions really hit the alien designs more because all of the interesting things that would set them apart required more resources..so Tim chose to emphasize the surface material, since the shaders were the one thing that the engine was fairly forgiving in. A bit of that process can be found below:

personally, I'd have gone in a different direction with the heads, but in the end I think we got some pretty interesting designs out of it.