Backyard Monsters (Kixeye)

Role: Concept Artist / Production Artist: Shared Creative Services Team

Released in 2010, Backyard Monsters became one of Facebook’s most influential real-time strategy games. “BYM” combined base-building, resource management, and creature warfare. It reached over 4.5 million active users and was recognized with the Mochi Award for Best Social Game. Developed by Kixeye, the game’s tone stood apart from its competitors with its mix of humor, gore, and personality-driven monster design.

As part of the shared creative services team, I contributed 2D production art, concept art, and marketing assets supporting multiple studios. My work spanned environment and base design, character development, and iconography, helping modernize the game’s look and push it toward a more collectible, toy-like world aesthetic.

Monster Evolution: From Classic to Redesign

Original vs. Final Style

Redesigning the original monster lineup while keeping the heart of the originals. The goal was to be HARDCORE but LOVEABLE.

The original monsters by Garick Damir had a raw, playful quality that captured the game’s early identity. My redesigns reinterpreted these characters through a more sculptural, production-ready lens. We added surface detail, lighting logic, and stronger silhouettes for both marketing and gameplay readability.

Creature Development Process

From silhouette to ability icons to refining anatomy, gesture, and clarity for mobile and browser gameplay

This stage covered the ideation pipeline for the franchise’s new monsters: silhouette exploration, pose studies, and final rendering for in-game and promotional use. My goal was to make each creature instantly recognizable in both thumbnail and motion, with anatomical exaggeration tuned for clarity and attitude.

Ability Icons:

I also created a unified icon system to represent each creature’s abilities, ensuring quick comprehension while keeping the playful visual tone consistent across the interface.

Champion Monsters” Backyard Monsters: Unleashed

Champion Monsters for Backyard Monsters: Unleashed: tiered evolution designs visualizing growth, mutation, and escalating power.

Developed specifically for the mobile version of the game, Backyard Monsters: Unleashed, the Champion Monsters expanded the creature system into tiered evolution paths. Each monster had three variant species (A, B, and C), and each species evolved through ten levels, transforming visually from small hatchlings into large, battle-ready apex forms.

My work on this system focused on defining the progression silhouettes, surface material logic, and color story that communicated power scaling and combat readiness. The designs had to stay legible on smaller screens while delivering higher visual drama for mobile markets.

Inferno & Brukkarg Expansions

Expansion-era monsters exploring new biomes, materials, and narrative subcultures

The Inferno and Brukkarg updates expanded the lore and design possibilities of the world. These new tribes gave me the chance to explore elemental variation, hybrid anatomy, and alternate cultural motifs. The idea was to take the familiar monster vocabulary into darker, more experimental territory.

Base & Building Design

Production and concept art for the game’s infrastructure, readable silhouettes designed to feel handmade and alive

The Backyard Monsters world balanced chaos with structure with mad-science energy plants, haphazard laboratories, and resource hubs that looked cobbled together from junkyard tech. Each design was meant to feel like something a monster would build, while still maintaining clear gameplay logic and upgrade readability.

Environments & Arena Maps

Environmental concept art blending suburban mayhem with Saturday-morning-cartoon color design.

For Backyard Monsters: Unleashed, I created environment concepts and parallax backgrounds that extended the world beyond the base grid. These scenes were hand-painted in Photoshop, built to feel like dioramas that could exist on a collector’s shelf, equal parts miniature and battlefield.

Branding & Identity

Franchise branding featuring ‘Dave’, merging humor, chaos, and collectible-toy energy into one visual identity.

The fan-favorite creature “Dave” became the official mascot of Backyard Monsters. I developed the updated logo, store icons, and promotional art that unified the game’s evolving art style that bridged nostalgia with a more commercially polished direction.