Pup of Joe

Pup of Joe was a game that I made with a group of people for my senior game design class. It is a café simulator game, where you play as a dog running a café for other dogs. My main jobs for the project were to do the character art, animation, and branding. The images below are what I have done.

Artwork

These are all the sprite sheets I designed for the characters in the game. The top dog is meant to look generic and serves as the player character. The rest of the dogs are customers and were inspired by specific breeds.

These were some variations of the main items players would serve: cake and coffee. The cake comes in either plain, frosted, jam, or frosted and jam, while the coffee comes in plain, sugar, cream, or sugar and cream.

Here are the UI elements that I designed for the game. The first item is a screen where the money would be displayed, which I shaped like a dog bone to stay on theme. The next items are little icon animations for the customer to help display their mood. Depending on how long it takes for a customer to get their order, the icon will differ, starting with the happy green, before going to a neutral white, and ending on an angry red. The final items are for customer orders. When a customer is thinking of what to order, the three dots will appear above their head. When they determine what they want, those dots will transition into an exclamation point. When a ready customer is checked on, the thought bubble will show an image of the food they want to be made.

This is the opening cutscene I made for the game. It was animated using both Adobe Animate and Premiere Pro. It is meant to serve as a form of entertainment for the players and help provide some context to for the game’s story.

The images above are the designs for both the logo and title. I wanted the design to be simple but still match the aesthetic of the game. I went through several different concepts but after some discussion with the group, this ended up being the design that we went with.

Concept Art

This is the concept art I created in terms of the games overall style. This was at a point where we were still figuring out the feel to the game, so not everything here was considered.

Once we determined a style, the other artists and I drew some concept art for some of customers. The image above is my contribution.

These were first sprite sheets for the player character back when we were trying to determine the proportions of everything on screen.

Here are all the concepts I designed for both the logo and title. The idea was to create something that combined the two main ideas of the game, dogs and coffee, so these designs are a portrayal of how to show both of them in a simple and appealing way.

As seen with the final design, we decided to go with the dog on the bottom left being in the mug right next to it. For the title, there was barely any change as the group believed it looked good and worked perfectly.