Scroll Thief---New and Improved

I finished round two of Scroll Thief, graduated, and got a job! This was back in April, but I've been busy.

Boss Texture

Here is what it looks like so far:

The underbelly is pretty dark. While this model won't be viewed against a black background in game, it's pretty much never a good idea to get too close to black, or you lose the form. This is supposed to be kind of a fire and shadow themed boss though, so it okay to go that dark?

Here it is with more evil eyes:

Which looks better?

Boss model

We are re-doing the boss for the first level of Scroll Thief. We wanted it to be a fire-themed tiger-like monster. I found it hard to get the fire theme to come across in the model itself, and I may tweak it further. Hopefully it will help once it's textured. Here is the rough draft:

Mostly just looks like a tiger. Here is the fiercer, stylized version:

Better, but is it enough? Should I make the fur spikier? I'm going to need to reduce the polygon count as it is, so I don't want to make it too complicated.

Scroll Thief Returns

Developing Scroll Thief was a wild ride, and I had a lot of fun doing it. Recently, I found a small team of talented people who thought it looked fun too, and we are enhancing and expanding the game over the next few months. One of the things I've been working on is art for the title screen and loading screen. Here's what I have:

I might end up having him slicing a word in half...maybe the game title. The ninja in the bottom one is not as cartoony, but then the rest of the image is. I'm not sure I like that. Is it distracting?