Making Mobile Games

Two years ago, I started a full-time job as a Mobile UI Designer with Pocket App Ltd. With a games design degree under my belt and no one at the company with games industry experience, I seized at the opportunity to upgrade my position and within a few months I became Games Producer. Since then I have worked on many exciting and challenging mobile projects, both game apps and standard apps with gamification design.

All of our projects are produced specifically for a range of clients, including some big names such as Panasonic and Square Enix, so I'm restricted on the graphics I can share on the web. However, there are some sneak peaks on my new portfolio website, www.alxbanner.com.

As much as I love the challenge of creating exciting solutions based on a clients brief, I am eager to work on an original indie game before I hang up my gamepads. Whether I'm lead designer, UI/UX designer or a character designer, I really don't mind what role I have. The most important thing is that I have a talented team to bounce ideas off and collaborate with. I've already been in talks with some cool developers so watch this space!

Unity partnership with Microsoft

Unity has recently announced a partnership with Microsoft and support for Windows 8, Xbox One, and Xbox 360. Windows Store Pro publishing add-on will also be free once it is released.

The future is looking ever brighter for Unity developers.


http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/06/27/build-conference/

Feng Zhu Digital Art Tutorials

If you're into your concept art and design, I can't recommend these tutorials enough. Feng Zhu is an awesome concept artist and his digital tutorials are in-depth and easy to follow.  All of his episodes are invaluable and FREE! Subscribe to his YouTube page for more...

This is one of my favourite episodes where he shows how he adds colour to game character line art as well as giving general advice for budding digital artists.

Wicked Princess - Concept and Idea Development (CID)

Recently, I have been working on a project where I will create conceptual art for a potential video game. The game is based on the story of 'The Wicked Prince' by Hans Cristian Anderson and the artwork will be finished by May 3rd.
Here are the list of the assets:

Environments
-Magnificent Ship Interior
-Magnificent Church Interior
-Devastated Peasant Village Exterior
-Heavenly Exterior

Props
-Prince's Primary Weapon
-Magnificent Ship Exterior (as vehicle)
-Prince's Army's Tools of Destruction
-Statue of Prince
-Prince's Treasure Item - inanimate or dead
-1-3 x Mundane Props from Devastated Village

Characters (one non-humanoid)
-Prince/Princess Protagonist
-Numberless Angel
-Priest (impoverished or otherwise downtrodden)

I've been wanting to design something that has influences from West African culture so will use the culture/traditions/people/architecture as my main reference. However, I want this to be a fictional game world so will combine with reference from other sources too. At the moment, I have created mood boards (see below for examples) for each asset and  made some initial sketches.

Village Exterior

Priest

Wicked Princess

Princess Statue

There's a lot of free-flowing experimentation at this stage - no idea is set in stone. Below are a few of my initial thumbnail sketches (I've highlighted my favourites) for my version of the 'wicked prince'. As you can see, I've gone for a female protagonist.

Silhouette thumbnails are good for focusing on the form of the character and less on the fine details. This is a new technique for me and not what comes naturally to me, but I have given it a try in these initial drawings. Still needs improvement but I can see the benefits - a strong silhouette is a key asset for any character concept.

My recent projects

Hi guys,

Here is a collection of some of my project work from the past year.
In Nov 2010, I completed work on the Xbox Live game, Big Tidy Up game, for the environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy. For this project I was lead artist and animator. Louis McLaughlin (Lead programmer), Tim Newsome (Team Leader), Chris Trott (artist) and Chris Owens (programmer) were the other members of the team. As well as our main duties, we all had a hand in the game design process which was a fun and fruitful process. We won numerous awards for our game and were very close to winning a year's contract with Rockstar North at the Game Republic Event.

In Dec 2010, I created an animation short with the focus on lip-sync. It was my first attempt at lip-sync, but it was a fun and challenging process. I also designed, modelled, textured and rigged the character, Francis the 'Lion'. I'm happy with this first attempt, but I feel the animation could be a lot stronger with a few more tweaks.

An on-going personal project of mine has been an original cross-platform product called, Sacred River. The project has been put on hold many times due to lack of inspiration and change in art direction, but I'm hoping to show you more very soon! Here is a concept image of the main character.

Let's get cracking!