Here's one of the puppets I've done for the game. This guy here is the chimpanzees in the game. I've done so many animal puppets for this game it was impossible to showcase them all. So I decided to showcase some of my favorites.

At one point in-development the Merge Zoo animals grow up. Here's the puppet for the adult version of the chimpanzee.

Puppet for the giraffe in the game.

Here's the adult version of the giraffe.

Panda bear puppet.

Adult panda bear puppet.

Saber tooth tiger puppet.

Adult version of the Saber tooth tiger puppet.

Pegasus puppet.

Pegasus adult version.

Ram puppet.

Concepts for the different mood states for the animals.

Here's the early character style exploration. At this point I was far off from the style I landed on.

Here's some more early style explorations. I was getting closes to the final style.

At this point I had a style I liked, and this was a character shotgun to test out the character style.

Early on in-development we had some trouble landing on the style and proportions for the adult versions of the animals. Here's concept showing this process. Funny how we ended up cutting the adult animals later in development.

The animals were going to be merged together early in-development, and here was an exploration on what these fused animals could look like.

Here's rough concepts for the weird animal fusions I had to come up with.

Animal puppet for one of the animal mashups. This guys is a fusion of a chimpanzee and a wolf.

Another mashup puppet. This sin against nature is a chimpanzee fused with a parrot.

This little guy is a fusion of a bunny and a saber tooth tiger.

This goofy guy is a fusion of a tiger and a giraffe.

This one's a tiger and a parrot mix.

Merge Zoo also had animals from different mythologies. This guy here was based on a Kitsune (nine tailed fox spirit).

The dude here's a Griffin.

This little guy is a pixie dragon.

This guy was based off Son Wukong (Monkey King) from Journey to the West.

These were created to be used for marketing ads. As you can see, they're enjoying their favorite food, candy!

Marketing image of the games tutorial character holding the two starting animals.

Character concepts for the main tutorial character.

Poses for the main tutorial character.

Character concept for an additional tutorial character. This guy was supposed to teach the player how to hatch eggs to get more animals.

Poses for the egg tutorial character.

Character concepts for another tutorial charater.

At one point Merge Zoo would have had players collect Zookeepers to help raise the animals, here are some of the artwork from this dropped feature.

Piggy bank created for the game's shop screen.

Illustration from a dropped festival feature.

Early splash screen illustration.

Early splash screen illustration.