Roblox - Vacuum the Forest Fire Game Characters, Theming and Prop Concepts

Before starting the project we knew we were going to have players putting out fires but not much else, so the concept team was tasked with exploring a variety of scenarios where we’d need to run around and put out fires

Some hand drawn sketches I drew early in the project, showing what the fire sprites could look like if the characters were kept fire-shaped and less blocky, along with showing how much expression they could have.

After working with the concept art team on possible ideas for the fire sprite characters, I modeled this guy in Roblox Studio using primitives and color overlays. One of our engineers then animated that model and used it for our in-game characters.

Once we had the fire sprite body shape decided on, I drew a variety of expressions to help nail down its attitude, including both grumpy and cute faces :D

Concept for the ash collecting receptacle - the player's vacuum only holds so much ashes at a time as they vacuum up the fire, so I sketched out a simple machine where they could dump the ashes and clearly see that they got money back

Early on, I sketched out ideas for a few Luigi's Mansion style backpack vacuums. The original idea was that as you vacuum up fire sprites, you could see them fill up the glass container on the player's back

Here's a rough storyboard I sketched, showing the original intent of seeing the player backpack fill up with fire sprites, and then returning the fire sprites to somewhere else once their fires had been put out and the sprites were happy again