ARTIST
2D ILLUSTRATION
GAME DESIGN
TECHNICAL ART
2D ANIMATION
VISUAL DEVELOPMENT
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A video game concept created in collaborated with UT JapanLab and a team of interns over four months based on a 1600s historical conspiracy. I led the art direction and created several art assets including visual novel backgrounds, visual novel characters, and pixel assets.
The game was decidedly split into a visual novel section and a pixelated open-world section which proved to be a really huge task and demand for the timeline. I wanted the mood and tone of the game to follow a sense of suspense and dark which was pretty out of my comfort zone at the time. To help find inspiration, I conducted a lot of research on numerous different aspects of the 1600s aspects. I was greatly influenced by the illustration print look as well as Japanese woodblock printing that I saw in the Blanton Museum in Austin, Texas with my team. Since the game is based in the island of Amboina, I sought out as many depictions of the island and dutch ships as I could to reference in my backgrounds.
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Since the historical event the game is based around only involved men, this was a very welcomed challenge to design historically accurate male characters. For the main character, he is characterized as a detective and observant person. To help signal that he is the player in the game, I decided to cover his face with a hat. Likewise, I tried to create the antagonist character look very boastful and annoying through his facial expressions. The last character I designed was greatly inspired by Japanese woodblock printing as the character is a Japanese captain - though not stylistically in line with the greater Japanese society of the time.
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For a 2D game exploration, I attempt to create a digitally-illustrated 2D environment and implement it using Construct 3. This project is still currently under development.
Environments created using megascans, Fab assets, procedural foliage, and procedural content generation in my 3D Materials and Lighting class taught by Isaac Oster. Though I am not primarily involved in 3D game/level design, I enjoyed the environment design process and greatly appreciated all there was to learn from Unreal 5. Each of these sequences provided myself practice in landscape sculpting, landscape material layering, HDRI lighting and atmosphere design, as well as PCG setup and design with foliage.
These art technical art studies that I have done under the instruction of Isaac Oster for Technical Art 1 class.
2D Walk Cycle Practice
For this 2D Platformer game, I am creating art assets using a kit created by Andrew Augustin who is the professor of my 2D Animation for Games course at UT Austin. The main character is a little girl character who portrays herself as a superhero - initially conceptualized as a pixel character months prior. I am a longtime fan of superheroes and comforting cartoony characters. A lot of my inspiration for this character came from Strawberry Shortcake, DC comics, Miraculous Ladybug, Hilda, and Little Nightmares. Below is my original design for the character.
The biggest things I needed to consider when transitioning from pixel to hand-drawn was resolution and silhouette. I need the details to be enough to create a visually vibrant and sweet little girl who ranges from 4-6 years old while also making the character easy to digest when scaled down. I feel very confident that the silhoette of the apple hat pushes the character to stand out, but I decided to work out different concepts as shown below.
I first did a rough sketch animation which I then playtested with a cleaner line-art. Finally, I rendered out the character with the desired color palette and cel-shading to emphasize a cartoony effect.
Interested in collaborating on a project? Please feel free to contact me or look at my other portfolio websites. For inquiries or direct contact, please email me at thedelisecanvas@gmail.com.
