Katelyn McConnell FIEA Art Blog: Making the Last Week Count

Making The Last Week Count

This past week I was put into a strange situation where the goal was to gain a portfolio piece within a week to the best of my ability. The class decided that I would be tackling the Strawberry.

Strawberry Progress

Although the initial glance at the Strawberry had me believing that the sculpt was done, I then realized that it was far from perfect. The sculpt as it currently was, was not good enough. It was low-res and haphazardly put together because it had been a speed sculpt for a common art project in the first semester that would only be viewed from one single side.

I adjusted some of the sculpt and began rebuilding parts of it so that it would be more presentable, but realized that I should get more of the process done than just the sculpt, so I moved on to the retopo process so that I could get a game res of this object and establish a pipeline.

Just another render in Zbrush

The retopo process took quite a bit of time because of the lack of symmetry on the entire object. The game res ended up being 5,173 Tris.

I then auto-UVed and began getting a bake done in Substance Painter

However, my first priority was to get a job. So, I pivoted a bit this week in order to try and get a portfolio piece that would specifically suit the needs of an open position at Imangi Studios, the company that makes Temple Run.

UI Adventure

One of our fellow students at FIEA recently landed a job as a producer at Imangi Studios, and she highly recommended that I apply as a UI Artist for the company because their artists in-house often wear multiple hats. Although I would get a job as a UI artist, I could be doing any multitude of things. For the last two months there has been a large group of FIEAns (15 of us) who have been preparing to participate in this weekend's Game Maker Toolkit (GMTK) Game Jam. I was the Art Lead on the project and I focused on UI for the entire experience. I also helped with the creation of the game idea itself and it's design.

Although it wasn't 3D, and although it may not be considered the "best" use of my time, this extra bit of experience in this 48 hour game jam did give me several things:

A UI portfolio piece
Experience in a large Game Jam Team
Another "Art Lead" project
Opportunity for employment

I first delved into a bit of research (1 hour max) of what logos within the space we were trying to aim for looked like. I looked into low-poly gaming experiences to see what their logos resembled. We then also settled on a style for the slimes that would be the center of our game, which was to match the Epic Game's Fortnight SLURP skins. From this, I was able to begin creating our style of UI!

Here's the UI that I created!

Final Game Logo

I focused on creating layers and structures within photoshop that would allow me to easily create a wide variety of things within a very similar style to what I was creating, while also allowing it to be highly iterative with color-layers so that I could change the colors on the fly as needed.

For the game's buttons, I created an "off" and "on" state so that when the mouse was hovered over it, it would change and look highlighted. It is a very small difference that is really only noticeable in-engine when it is working, so here I have showcase the "on" state of the buttons.