Turbo Pudding
Helicorn is a game you watch from above, at a steep angle, the way a bird sees a meadow. That one fact decided most of how it looks. Here is a page from the sketchbook: how Thistle and the Paver’s machines got their look.
Two colors that belong to the enemy
Before a single model was built, the game had color rules. Your helicopter is always the brightest thing on screen. It is never yellow with black, and never magenta. Yellow with black hazard stripes belongs to the Paver’s machines. Magenta belongs to enemy shots and nothing else, so one glance tells you what can hurt you.
Thistle, a retired seeding helicopter
Thistle used to sow meadows from the air, and her shape still says so. She has a round body and a big round canopy. Under the bubble sit two seats side by side, and you can see their headrests through the frame. On short stub wings ride two hoppers, the pods that once carried seed and now carry missiles. There is a cannon under the nose, skids below and the ranger number 7 on both sides of the tail fin.
In her stock paint, Thistle is white with an orange stripe and green trim. Old Hatch, the mechanic, puts it simply: “She sowed clover for thirty years. Bring her back in one piece.”
Made to be read from above
The first test frames showed a problem. Seen from above, the helicopter was too easy to lose on a green meadow. So Thistle got a quarter bigger, 1.25 times her old size, and got an orange deck on her back, the part of her you see most of the time. She also had two shadows at first. Now she has one soft spot on the ground under her.
The Paver’s yard
The villain of Helicorn is the Paver, a road machine that wants the whole world to be one big parking lot. Its army is a yard of robot construction machines: dozers, rollers, mixers, cranes and forklifts. They are yellow with black hazard stripes, with orange cones here and there. Every machine has an empty cab and one glowing beacon on top, its only “eye.” There is never a driver, and never a face.
Size was a rule too. A small ground machine is at least three meters long, and a flying drone at least 1.6 meters across, so they still read on a phone. On gold targets, the ones worth extra Scrap, the beacon glows gold.
Later, the living machines got 8 percent bigger and 12 percent brighter, and their wrecks got darker, so you can tell at a glance what still needs breaking.
Fixed in the first frames
The first look at Greenfold Meadows came with a to-do list. The grass was a noisy mosaic, and it became a smooth blend of greens. The barn roofs were upside down. Once turned the right way, they read as black slabs from above, so they became gray tin. Wrecks looked like plain black boxes, so they became warm gray with chunks of yellow paint. Flying debris came out as black squares until it got its own shading. The shots got thicker, with a bigger glow. And roads that stopped in a square in the middle of a field now run on 120 meters past it.
The rings of flowers around craters were toned down too: softer colors, smaller flowers, a wider ring. The meadow grows back without hiding the fight.
Two more silhouettes
Thistle has two hangar mates in the full game, and each needed a shape of its own. Dandelion, the light scout, is a slim pod with a glass nose on a thin boom, with a hoop around the tail rotor. On top of its rotor sits a white fluffy ball of little tufts, a dandelion seed head, which is what you see from above.
Ironbark, the heavy one, has a wide barrel body like a tree trunk, with bark ridges and steel plates. Its nose is a sawn log end with growth rings, and twin guns poke out under it. Its roof is cream-colored armor, because a brown helicopter seen from above would vanish into the ground.
Eight more paint jobs open up with Ranger Badges, from Sunrise at 3 badges to Goldleaf at 66. Each one recolors all three helicopters, and every body stays light.
A horn for a mast
The name came last. Helicorn is heli plus acorn plus unicorn, and the logo shows it. Over the letter I stands a golden twisted horn, and at its tip spins a rotor: the horn is the rotor mast. In the first try, the horn covered the top of the I, and the I looked lowercase, so the horn moved up a little. The app icon uses the same trick, a helicopter seen from the side with a golden horn for a mast, on dark green.
Fly Thistle
World 1, Greenfold Meadows, is free to play in your browser at helicorn.com. The full game, all six worlds, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Helicorn page.
