Not much commentary to make here. Some of this stuff ended up in game. Most didn’t.

An early attempt to try and design around the established iconography of Monopoly. One of the goals of the game was create something novel that still felt immediately true to Monopoly. The block letters were one of the first things to go. When you have to translate a game into other languages, block letters can get very expensive.

My first attempt at the GO building. Taking inspiration from Tekkon Kinkrete and early Atlantic City architecture (the city Monopoly is based on). This was the one case where it was decided that the block lettering was worth it and had to be modeled in every applicable language.

The building below actually was modeled (and improved on by the talented Ken Lim). It didn’t make it into the default board but ended being salvaged for the “Monument City” board.

Another design that didn’t make the cut. Here you can see the two different rendering approaches I work with. In the approach above I build the structure out of shapes, then render over it. I like it because it gives a nice painterly finish, and is closer to what things look like in game.

The approach below is nice because its quicker, and still has a nice polished look.

The one that survived the cut.

So 2010, I spent a good chunk of my time working on Monopoly Streets. I got to do a lot of fun concept; buildings, character and general look-and-feel type of stuff. I character stuff was probably the funnest stuff to do, but the most satisfying stuff was doing architectural and building design. Here are a couple pieces I worked on that I really liked. I’ll post some stuff that actually ended up in-game later. The piece above was an early look-and-feel exploration while we were still exploring the concept of playing Monopoly in an actual growing city. Early on with dabbled with the idea of the game-board progressing through the century as you advanced. It was decided pretty quickly that that would be a bit too much to try and accomplish within our time frame. It was a fun piece to work on none-the-less. Below is the first of a couple of early house designs for Park Place and Boardwalk. The idea was to design something that felt like a high-end city dwelling.

I first did a rough sketch with blue pencil. You can see that after I scanned it in and dropped in a perspective grid, my freehand perspective mistakes became obvious.

Here’s the rough inks after fixing some of the perspective problems. The digital inking was done in Painter. I still prefer the line quality I get in painter to that of Photoshop. Sadly, its the only thing I use Painter for.

Final color done in Photoshop. Here are the inks for the Boardwalk concept. The perspective and line-work on this is a bit better.

With final color.

Unfortunately, neither of these concepts ended up being used in the final game. Thus is the life of a concept artist. Oddly enough, not having a concept used in the final game doesn’t disappoint me, as long as I was still able to do work I was proud of. Case in point: With the time restriction of real-world game design, you don’t always have the time (or the need) for a fully rendered concept. Below is an quick thumbnail I did for Free Parking. I didn’t take the concept any farther than this, and it ended up being used in the game. Not something I’d put in my portfolio, but that’s how it works sometimes.  Next time I’ll post some stuff that I got to render out AND was used in the final game.

Here are a couple of quick cockpit and chair designs I did for Nerf N-Strike Elite. Baby seats anyone?