Call of Duty Mobile
First-person shooter game concept & UI design
Activision & Tencent J3
My role
Concept Artist
2D Character Designer
@2D Art Team
@Tencent Timi J3
Timeline
2020-2021
Design Flow
Character design research
2D concept sketching
Concept refining
3D modeling
Software used
Adobe Photoshop
Blender
Marvelous Designer
Zbrush
Background
Started at Call of Duty Mobile working as a concept designer in 2020…
In 2020, right after my undergraduate graduation, I joined Tencent Timi Studios' J3 department to develop Call of Duty Mobile (CODM) as a junior game concept designer. As one of the nine people in the 2D design team, within the 350+ people CODM development team, this was a challenging experience for me to initially ship the AAA game concept under the supervision of game veterans from Tencent and Activision, with extremely fast production speed (every 1 month for a new version update).
To be more specific about the work content, I participated in creating various characters, skins, and prop designs under the art director's brief, honing my unique working pipeline: from 2D sketching to 3D modeling to 2D detail polishing in order to ship the design concepts.
The first character I designed
Esther
I usually start my concept work from very rough sketches addressing the different directions without taking care of too much details. At the same time, I also conduct a through research toward the design directions and therefore build up an image library in Eagle, so that I'll have a solid understanding of the basic configuration, and also set a good foundation in the next steps flexing out the details.
2D design of
Esther
In-game display
Esther
Other orginial concept explorations
2D character design
Other orginial concept explorations
Weapon design
Some take aways
Photo of the Tencent Timi J3 office, shoot on 2021
Some takeaways…
1/ The pandemic strengthened my commitment to Metaverse design
When I started my career two years ago, I could never foresee how the pandemic had confirmed my commitment to be a designer architecting the Metaverse. I began my journey as a game concept designer at Tencent Timi Studio, where I was actively involved in developing games for socially isolated people, in which they are enabled to interact with each other in the collective virtual world. I witnessed how games, being the crux of Metaverse at the current stage, empowered my art and design to be relocated in a more pragmatic and interactive position, aiding people through hard times with casual fun.
2/ In game, art and design became more interactive and pragmatic
This working experience made me realized a successful game is the culmination of art and technology, which intrigued me to hone a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of emerging design technologies which leads my way to Harvard Design Engineering program.