Originally, when I did the mock-ups for it, when I did the first concepts, I had a really low Poly fruit - it was a-a, you know, hexagonal or octagonal-shaped fruit. Um, but kind of more deeply - we ended up coming up with these two core concepts for the aesthetics of our game, and that really defined everything else that followed.Um, one was, there was myself and the artist, Shath McGuire, he’s a very talented artist, and we came up with this idea that we should always - what we want to strive towards is that you can smell the fruit. This is what we want to do - we wanted you to actually be hungry to eat fruit after playing the game, and everything actually really naturally flowed from that. So as soon as we had that idea, the fruit became higher poly, because we wanted it to be more realistic. Not too realistic, ‘cause, you know, actual realistic fruit doesn’t look as good as cartoon fruit. That really defined that balance. Um, it totally is the reason why we have so many particles, so many crazy particles all over, ‘cause we wanted you to get that sensation of wetness, almost - that moisture, that spray when you slice it, and it also defined the way that we did the splatters on the walls. The other core aesthetic that I was really pushing was for there to be a lot of contrast or a juxtaposition. So the reason that the original background for Fruit Ninja was a really plain, really dark wooden board, was so that then, all of the fruit, all of the juice, all of those effects would have the maximal amount of contrast popping up off it. And then, that’s uh, evident in the sound design as well, because there’s no backing track. There never used to be, at least - there’s one now, but there was never a backing track, other than just this very soothing sound of a stream running, and birds.And then that would provide maximum impact for those really kind of brutal impact and splatter sounds. So the two core aesthetics really that kind of guided all of that were, um, were these sensations of wanting to be able to smell what you were doing, and having maximum amount of contrast to create impact.
