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
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.
Other orginial concept explorations
2D character design