Mushroom Kid's Big Grass Sword Key Art

Mushroom Kid's Big Grass Sword ★

Key Art

Full production: September 2023 -> PRESENT
Game Jam: November 2022

Steam Itch.io

About the Game

Mushroom Kid's Big Grass Sword is a physics-based precision platformer that follows Mica, a little mushroom, on a journey to save their village from a giant bird with a sword that grows! Wield the Blade of Grass and use it to pull yourself over ledges and obstacles as it slowly becomes longer and more unwieldy. Combining this with Mica's jumping and gliding abilities creates a platforming experience like no other!

  • Team size: Currently 5
  • Engine: Godot
  • Language: GDScript

Origin

Mushroom Kid's Big Grass Sword started out as a game jam game called Sword of the Morel for the 2022 Game/Music Jam, but after winning Best Visuals and Best Soundtrack,, the team decided to revamp the game a year later and bring it to a full release. Now, we have an award winning Steam demo, and have acquired over $26,000 in combined funding for the game. This includes our successful Kickstarter campaign, award money, and other grants put toward bringing this game to completion.

Awards

My Contributions

As the art lead, I work with the art team to make sure all of the game art is planned out, cohesive, and fits the unique style of the game. I'm also the animator, UI artist, and character artist/designer, so I created all of the animated assets in the game, designed the characters, and created assets for the game's UI. I also handle in-engine art implementation; UI, UX, and marketing art; as well as help out with general level design, narrative design, and pacing.

Art

The art in MKBGS is pixel art at a fairly big scale (our tiles are 32x32), so a lot of our assets are very large and have room for detail. However, for the sake of the art style, I do put an emphasis on keeping things fairly rounded and simple, especially since the game's style is very lighthearted and squishy.
As of right now, the art team consists of two people: me and our environmental artist. Because of this, I make a handful of things like tilesets and decorative assets as well.

Here are some examples of my character animations in the game:

Grandmashroom's Idle Mica's Run Animation Mica's Idle Animation Mica's Death Animation Ink's Idle Spore Stone Idle Penelope's Idle Enoki's Idle

Some mechanics and decor:

Bounce Pad Animation Save Point Triggered Fire Animation Wind Tunnel Animation

Environmental tiles and pieces:

Temple Tileset Taiga Platforms Heart Entrance

Some UI:

Options UI Save Select UI

And that big money shot!

Town Hall Taken

Design

In the design department, I've worked on napkin sketches, refining those sketches into more cohesive gameplay beats, and implementing them into the initial graybox of the levels. I also have experience working with implementing narrative beats with a plugin for Godot 4 called Dialogic.

After the inital graybox is complete, I'm also tasked with going back in to make sure the pacing feels good. If not, I add or remove traversal between points of interest, and find good places for narrative character moments!

Marketing

When it comes to marketing our game, I'm in charge of creating a lot of the graphics for it. Here are some examples of images I've made for our social media accounts:

Team Broke Kids with award from BostonFIG BostonFIG Announcement Team Broke Kids at BostonFIG Steamdeck Announcement