A pretty fun challenge.

Luckily Paul Pereda, our concept artist is such a great guy to work with and stepped up to the task. We started working closely together, him painting out ideas while I prototyped with boxes and checked that all the pieces could work together in animation for all the different movements and transformations.

Early on we knew we wanted to make it as big and bulky looking as possible. This directed us towards having these metal parts and covers that gave us visual volume while still leaving enough empty space in between to contract the parts together.

It took a few days to get a box model that kind of worked, a title screen with all the animation timing set right, and to have all the major volumes create the overall shapes we wanted for different stages.