ISAAK LIEN'S GAME ART PORTFOLIO

ART DIRECTIONS

ARTWORK

BUBBLE SHOOTER : PANDA POP!

As an Art Director on the mobile game, Panda Pop, I directed the internal and external art team to create high fidelty art assets, animations, VFX, and UI for content, gameplay, features, thematic reskinning events, and sales.

ART DIRECTIONS

FEATURES

WINSTREAK: KEEPING IT REEL

Keeping it Reel is a feature where the fish gets pulled in everytime a player wins on the first try. Whichever player gets first place fastest gets a reward chest and proceeds on to the next tier until they reach the final for a bigger price.

One of the challenges was to visually separate them while providing a sense of prestige and added challenge the higher the tier goes.

• Worked with team leads to figure out thematics, UI layout and Ratios, functionality, necessary art, animation, and vfx elements.

• Figure out how to visually separate each of the 3 tiers with colors, environment, and props

• Previsualized thematics to determine viability

• Create Prompt for art team and breaking feature into achievable bite sized tasks

• Monitor progress and quality until project completion

These are samples of art direction I gave to the team to execute my creative vision.

Tier and end popups I art directed

COLLECTION : FIREFLY FESTIVAL

• I held meetings with the team to brainstorm ideas and produced visualization sketches to help us decide what we ultimately wanted, which, based on numerous context considerations ended up being a firefly.

• Since we had past environments that provided a great setting and mood for this creature I tried to continue some of the aesthetics, design sensibilities, and magic integration for the native environment.

• In regards to deciding on in-game animations, a key factor in the key frame design was imagining what type of movements a firefly would do within the bubble and how we could exaggerate the movements during idle and bubble pop animations to maximize visual interest, reliability, and readability.

• Once all the pieces were figured out I created a multi-paged prompt detailing all the specs, providing art directions, as well as templates needed to draw at the right format and proportions and sent it to the art team to execute, overseeing and providing feedback as needed.

This gameplay feature adds an extra collection item, the firefly, aside to the main objective of saving the panda babies in order to add an extra layer of challenge for players who want more prizes. I worked with the stakeholders of the team and guided and art directed the feature to ensure high quality art bar as well as stylistic and thematic consistency with the rest of the game.

THEMATIC RESKIN

Fire Festival

On a quarterly basis we would retheme the game based on the season, feature, or game mechanic. My job was to come up with the theme, art vision, as well as guide the team to produce high quality art assets to refresh and elevate the player's experience also use the same assets as app store promotional and marketing material to attract new players. I focused on having the team exaggerate the dynamism of the character pose and expressions, composition, and perspectives as well as attractive costumes designs of the character themselves. Some of the retheming even included:

• Fire Festival ( the highlighted reskin)

• 10th Anniversary

• Surf's Up

COOKIE JAM

I took part in art directing splash screens, progressional island maps, pet costumes, crm sale, cookie walk, panda puzzles, collection dessert items.

SPLASH SCREEN

I came up with the seasonal and location themings of these splash screen and art directed the concept and production rendering of these splash screens and characters. After the assets come in I polish and do some post production to make sure the characters and environments are visually harmonious and appealing.

ISLAND MAPS

I oversaw, managed, monitored, and art directed the concept and production rendering of 400+ Cookie Jam maps. I also created a concept and render style guide to improve efficiency and consistency. The mouth watering magical islands are used as the match 3 level progressional meta based on real and fictional landmarks and reconstructed using the desserts of the culture.

PANDA PUZZLES

Sample Art direction

This is an ingame feature that encourages level progression playing on the player's curiosity and completionist attitude of uncovering puzzle pieces of an illustration on the day of the life of the panda family. My job here was working with the artists to produce high fidelity illustrations, that were brand consistent, appealing, tell interesting stories, and spec fitting.

CRM SALE

Work with the CRM team to make sure the Sale popups look appealing, had a limited color palette, and had a great read hierarchy

MARKETING

While working on this project, I also worked with the marketing team to make sure the markeing material were visually consistent with the brand art style as well as making a great visual impact for the existing and future players.

PET POWER

These are costumes designed for a our pet power feature. The basic game mechanic involves filling the bar with matches and getting a power move that is pet specific which takes out multiple blockers like waffles, chocolate, and etc. My role was to monitor progress on the renders and provide art directional feedback as needed.

AIRSHIPS

I art directed the 3D Artist to execuet airship concepts , making sure they look awesome. Some of my focus was getting the shape, lighting, and material right so they look satisfying, delicious, and appealing.

VISUAL EXPLORATION FOR POTENTIAL COOKIE JAM REVAMP

Sketches and previsualization work I did to reimagine the brand for a possible new direction.

MY COOKIE JAM ART

Concept and Production for Cookie Jam I hand drawn or painted for content and collaborational pitches with companies like iHop and Starbucks.

SLOT REVOLUTION

This is a mobile game project our studio, Kung Fu Factory, worked on for Konami. The game was interesting because it combined RPG battler and slot machine game mechanic.

My role here was:

• Work on character explorations, concepts, and production renders.

• Establish the look of the main character

• Concept and Render in game trinkets

BEGENEROUS

This is an unreleased mobile game project that was based on saving the environment and getting celebrities to actually donate money to certain enviornment causes. At the time one of the general direction set by the CEO of Kung Fu Factory was to make the game feel toy-like and cute so I focused on making the proportions more exaggerated and cute. Some of the tasks I worked on include but are not limited to:

• Style Exploration

• Design and create vector based isometric building and props

• Design and create vector based character and cut up for animation purposes

A BIKE RACE OF NINJA TEMPLE

This is one of many games I worked on while working with Mega Rock LLC called A Bike Race of Ninja temple. This game became one of the top 10 in apple app store rankings free category at the time and raked in a ton of players. The CEO's directives were to make the character simple, iconic, memorable, relatable, and distinguishable and that's exactly what I portrayed with my artistic execution and vision. A large part of making the character distinct from each other was focusing on varying the silhouettes and through having a very limited color combination as a larger percentage. I created all the art for this game but it included but not limited to:

• Character and Bike design and production art

• Backgrounds

• Tileable ground

• User Interface

BRIGHTWOOD ADVENTURE

This is the first mobile game project I worked on called "Brightwood Adventure", which is about an animal forest kingdom.

These are Isometric buildings and props I designed and finalized in adobe animate (flash back in the days), which means the final production work is done in vector. Task I worked on for this game includes but are not limited to

• Create building and prop thumbnails

• Create production art for building and props