Don't Roast

Don't Roast Trailer

Don’t Roast is a 2D boss fighting game from the perspective of a marshmallow named Graham. Featuring 5 boss battles, unique weapons for various playstyles, and a short story delivered through dialogue, Don’t Roast is the tale of Graham’s vengeance against the scouts that corrupted their idyllic campfire homeland. Embark on the fun adventure from themellowbunch and, most importantly, don’t get roasted!

Hi! I’ll be your guide! themellowbunch’s UI artist for Don’t Roast. For this game, I tried my hand at pixel art and creating UI for games. I found out that games require a lot of UI. Every button, HUD, and menu name requires a UI asset and critical design thinking and that adds up relatively fast when you’re planning it out. On top of that, I had to give my best to match our more experienced 2D artists when it came to the pixel art style. The majority of my artwork was done in the software Piskel while any planning or editing of assets was done in Photoshop. Don’t Roast as a whole was developed in Unity. Some would even say it’s the Dark Souls of campfire eatery- I’ll see myself out.

The Conceptualizing

Before we got to our development guide, our game was a mind map pitched by Alexia (one of our artists and animators) with the high concept of a fighting game from the perspective of a marshmallow. From the mind map you can see what elements were around at the beginning and persisted to the end of development and where others were cut.

Don't Roast Game Development Guide

As the UI artist, I’m going to put forth a bunch of… well, UI conceptualization from this point onwards. However, you’ll find a fascinating amount of conceptualization compounded in our game development guide from the perspectives of our level designers, artists, and sound designer, including gameplay boards, rough world map overviews, and art, so I encourage you to scroll through!

My first go at our game’s UI wireframe is chaotic to say the least. I was throwing whatever came to mind into a photoshop canvas when it came to UI screens and the logical progression that would occur from hitting any said button. It resulted in the mass of criss-crossing arrows laid before you now. If you squint, you can still see some of the UI choices that persisted all the way to the end of development, such as the load out screen and the battle screen.

From that first pass, I extrapolated this clearer wireframe. Then, after receiving the go ahead from the dev team, I shifted focus into creating the UI assets for the game.

The UI

According to the lore of our game, all basic structures in the world of Don’t Roast are constructed out of graham crackers. Following this theme, I created all the UI elements to resemble a graham cracker in their most basic form.

Buttons are squares of crackers and when you rollover them they appear toasted, frames are constructed from multiple aligned crackers, and chocolate is used as the glue that holds everything together in this world. Graham, our marshmallow protagonist, has all these basic elements in their health UI since they represent the world of Don’t Roast before everything went sideways.

Since the core of Don’t Roast’s gameplay loop revolves around boss

battles, my focus was largely concentrated on personalizing the bosses’ health bars. Every boss has their own UI elements tailored to their specific design and color palette all while harking back to the idea that the UI is built from graham crackers. Additionally, certain bosses’ UIs foreshadow their second phase either through their overall theme, like Sally’s thematic focus on strings that are nowhere to be seen throughout her first phase, or through the depletion of their HP bar, like the slow reveal of The Scout’s depleted black and white HP bar.

Game Downloads

If you’re interested in checking out the cute and unsettling world of Don’t Roast, then you can download it to play on Itch.io!

Available for Windows, Mac, Android, and IOS platforms.