Yara Mayumi | Game Artist and Art Director

Time Hoppers - The Silk Road is an adventure RPG game for primary school about four friends going back to the Golden Age of Islam to save scientists and their valuable inventions from the hands of a malign and ambitious man. In this first level, the kids time travel to an old Baghdad and rescue alchemist Ibn Hayyan with his formula to purify gold.

The art style chosen took inspiration from the old artifacts and paintings that documented these past times, with heavy research on clothing, habits, architecture, social structure, and cultural and scientific contribution that was essential to the development of our contemporary society.

Below are some of the art the team created, and environment design, art and interface I developed.

The outdoors was designed based on the old Round City of Bagdad, representing a section of the town. After setting the art style, the team created assets and props like buildings, vegetation and characters, while I structured the tilemaps and tilesets, also helping develop the narrative and level design in parallel.

Here are interiors I created and produced, based on research from Iraqi architecture and decor, to make the environment ludic and detailed with history accuracy. Everything is placed on a tilemap and the trap animations for the procedural dungeons and the Observatory time machine were made frame-by-frame.

Time Hoppers has some mini-games placed along the story. The decoding puzzle was inspired by Islamic patterns as they amazingly fit in tilings. Also, the note message was hand-written, based on Arab writing and calligraphy.

Being responsible for the interface, I had to make it possible for windows, boxes and buttons to follow the established art style while working over the already existent interface template and character editor system. After many iterations, a tiled 9-patch solution worked to emulate old papers and keep the textures without distortions.

The HUD icons and navigation elements also were inspired by Arab graphics and patterns. The font was chosen to ornate with the game theme while being pleasant and readable for kids.

The logo was designed to pair old and modern with the typeface and textures, using contrasting colors and dynamic action lines to convey the time-traveling subject. It was used for the title screen, illustrated by Caio and me, and for promotional material.