John Twister is a shoot-em-up game I helped contribute to in a group project; I was tasked with making most of its art assets. The game is about a minimum wage worker who gets swept up in a tornado with nothing but a shopping cart and an ice cream machine. The goal is to get to the center of the tornado and defeat the source of the storm: John Twister.

I drew whatever the team wanted from me in Piskel. I was tasked with designing enemies/obstacles that flew in various patterns, the background, the protagonist, and the final boss. The enemies/obstacles would be random debris that got caught up into the storm. These varied from bricks and pipes to chickens and eldritch eyeballs.

Some criticism I received was the tornado background being unclear as to which way the wind was blowing, so I added some white lines in the animation to help indicate that it goes to the left. Another gripe was with the eldritch eyeball; The rest of the team wanted a separate animation for when it fired its sniping shot, so I made just that. One final gripe that wasn’t from the team was John Twister’s original design. The orange and yellow hair really clashed with the tornado-themed facial hair, so I changed it to better match the theming.