First drafts of Zorba lines game. Characters and main screen

Its always cool to look back at how it all started. Barnie was protesting against publishing these pics but he gave up eventually. Soon we'll show how he draws the characters, its really amazing

The first draft of the game field. It came out to be really dark because initially we looked at Color Lines 1992 as an original and it was very grayish, which was OK for the time. When we looked at this one we got so terryfied that we started thinking very quickly - what our game should feel like? Who is it for? Who plays such kind of games nowadays? Where does the action take place? what is the story behind all these characters?

A week or so later we came out with a descision that it should be bright, that the action takes place in Greece. And the story is that a sneaky greek banker and his affiliates have stolen the money from nice ballish characters. We also realized that such kind of games is usually played by women and the setting should be bright. So we moved on, made the game lighter and changed the characters a bit.

So the general idea is that you make up lines of 5 and more on a field of 9x9 and get the points. After each move 3 new balls are added to the field. The more you advance the harder it is to get the points. To get your money back you have to reach Zorba or his friends, the amount of points is represented by the red line above the field.

The next change in the design came with the idea that all our characters should come from the same world, and in this world everything is round and has the same size, same eyes and everyone is a little mad - dont ask me why.

So this is how the main screen looks now. We also choose to use grey tiles instead of white ones, just because it looks better and we wanted the game to be minimalistic

The main menu also had its shifts. The main idea was that it should be light, joyful and minimalistic. Plus we added a rotational information banner where on random you can see your average score, high score and other info about your game.

Drawing charachters wasnt easy, but unexpectedely the most time consuming part was the animation of all the 11 characters, which you can open during the game. This really was a surprise to us, which we didnt expect when we started. But thats another story, hope you enjoyed.