Erica Chen

A 2D/3D Artist in school for Game Arts


3D Sculpts

The Broken Bridge is part of a larger project titled the Armored Giant, containing both an exterior environment and an interior environment. All assets were modeled in Maya, sculpted in Zbrush if extra details were needed, then textured in Substance Painter. Everything was then brought into Unity, where the environment was put together and lit.The cliff rocks were made by Luchaaa as part of an asset swap project.


The Forgotten Library is part of a larger project titled the Armored Giant, containing both an exterior environment and an interior environment. Similar to the Broken Bridge above, all assets were modeled in Maya, then textured in Substance Painter. Everything was then brought into Unity, where the environment was put together and lit.


A character design based loosely on Ser Bedwyr. I used ZBrush, Maya, and Substance Painter to complete the model.


Murder of Crows is a 3D environment sculpted in Maya and Zbrush, then textured in Substance Painter. Final touch ups and paint overs were done in Procreate.


The Moonlit Giant is a 3D environment modeled entirely through Maya, with the narrative of a village who survived an attack from an ancient monster.


This prince was very loosely based on the Little Prince, keeping only the yellow scarf. His accessories are unruly, showing his slow decent into madness, as he hasn’t bothered to look presentable for absent eyes. The blue color palette was chosen to match the coldness and darkness of space, while also mimicking the look of stars. The model was sculped in Nomad Sculpt and Blender and textured in Blender.


2D Work


Games

A 30 minute video game I made with L3ad Planet and Ann-Marie Henderson.I was the concept artist and character artist, establishing the visual style and working closely with the environment artist to ensure a cohesive and unified aesthetic. I created the bones and extra items of each level, as well as the characters of the game using Maya and Substance Painter. Additionally, I created the majority of the UI assets, including buttons, textboxes, and the start and end screen illustrations. The game was made using Unity Engine.


A high score game I made with L3ad Planet and KiroRonin. I made all the art, designs, and assets. I also helped in coming up with the game design and the concept and difficulty of the game.
The game was made in 30 hours for the Global Game Jam using Unity Engine.


A short video game I made with L3ad Planet.
I was in charge establishing the visual style and general art direction. I created the assets, including the UI and sprites. Additionally, I created all the 3D models and rigging, with Maya and Substance Painter. The game was made using Unity Engine.


A competitive two player game I made with L3ad Planet.
I was in charge establishing the visual style and general art direction. I created all the assets, including the UI and sprites, and all the animations. The game was made using Unity Engine.


A quick, story driven top-down RPG I made for Guide and Seek, an online art community.
I created several assets including the animations, the tilesets, the sprites, and the ending screen. The UI, cover, and prop assets were done by Amy Chen. The game was made using Unity Engine.


A short narrative experience. I created all the assets and the code. The game was made using Unity Engine.


A high score game made entirely by me, aside from the sound. I created all the art assets and the code. The game was made using Unity Engine.

About

Hello! I'm Erica, a student at Pratt Institute based in Brooklyn, NY. I'm currently pursuing a BFA in Game Arts and am passionate about all aspects of game creation, though I have a soft spot for any narrative game.I have a professional interest in character design, environmental design, lighting, and general tech and concept art!You can reach me at any of the links below!

Broken Bridge

The Broken Bridge is a 3D environment walkable through in Unity Engine. The goal was only to learn lighting and texturing within Unity, and to learn to use Unity’s terrain system. The player is led through an outdoor space with an intriguing narrative before finding themselves at the final lit ruins in the background.

I began with the idea of a broken bridge, wanting to create both a main path and a perceived path, where the player would see the bridge that leads directly to the ruins in the distance and wish to cross the bridge to their destination, but the interruption forces them to find the cliffside ledges as an alternate route. The player, an explorer, wishes to recover the civilization that has been long lost and disconnected from the rest of the world. The sword remains from the forgotten battle that destroyed the city and cut off any history that may have survived from it, leaving it just beyond reach.I was also very attached to the idea of a single, bright light in the background. The light would not only be a secondary focus point to indicate to the player where to go, and also serve as a narrative device, hinting that one building still remained occupied, despite the abandonment of the rest.

After greyboxing in Maya, I played around in Unity to test alternate lighting and colors. I decided to merge the elements I liked from all three. The colors from the top left, which were the original colors and lights that I had in the earlier concept art. I incorporated the shadow from the bottom image to add some more drama and contrast. Finally, the top right image was originally not used at all, but several iterations led to the sword being too hidden in the dark, so I added a much less intense spot light from above, which gave the sword both a more emphasized rim light, and made its details more visible.

The final product contained assets modeled in Maya, sculpted in ZBrush, and textured in Substance Painter. Effects were added and everything was put together, lit, and color graded in Unity.The platforming cliff rocks were made by Luchaaa as part of an asset swap project, where each student had to create an asset for another classmate to experiment with different stylizations.

Forgotten Library

The Forgotten Library is a continuation of the Broken Bridge, set underneath the ruins. Similar to the Broken Bridge above, the environment is walkable through Unity Engine, entered through a trapdoor from the exterior scene.

I created several variations of the bookshelves, books, candles, and textures, to scatter and populate the area, ensuring that, while the environment is inherently repetitive, the player would not feel bored.

After entering the interior, the player will find themselves in an abandoned library layered with bookshelves. The bottom of the long, spiral staircase will lead players directly facing the central book, the final focus and destination. The book is open to the page that provides some insight on the history of the world and the giant who wielded the sword that destroyed the civilization explored earlier. This project was intended to practice different types of lighting, shadow, and light and reflection probes within an interior space.

Murder of Crows

A Murder of Crows is a fully textured environmental piece modeled in Maya. The only goal was to create an interesting fantastical environment with an evocative narrative using elements that either do not necessarily belong together or just make an interesting pair.

While I was playing around with the thumbnails, I came up with various ideas using opposites, such as a comparison between deep sea divers and astronauts, the contrast of medieval style armor in a futuristic cyber city, heat and cold, a greenhouse of ocean plants, and crows praying to scarecrows. The final idea I landed on was a play on the term “murder of crows”, where crows would look down at the corpse below, and the trees would be littered with various murder weapons, as if the crows commited the crime then robbed the victim.

I did color ways for my two favorite thumbnails, using mainly gradient maps at this stage to maintain a more cohesive and unified color set. For the crows, I wanted something dark and ominous, so I went with the first option, then expanded on it by adding more cold, blue tones.

For the final product, I made 2 crows and rigged them to easily add more variation. All the assets were made in Maya, focusing on topology and UV unwrapping, then sculpted over in ZBrush to create the hand painted, heavily textured look of the final work. This effect was further emphasized in Substance Painter. Final touch ups and paint overs were added in Procreate.

Ser Bedwyr

Ser Bedwyr is a character design based on the Arthurian legend of Sir Bedivere of the Knights of the Round Table. I wanted his design to be largely centered around hands, as his character is often identified by being one handed, having lost one of them in battle.

I decided to give him a gold color scheme to match that of his coat of arms, which can be seen as a gold griffon on a red backing, or a red symbol that greatly resembles the Auvergne flag on a yellow background. The main aspect of the design references the latter, making most aspects of the armor, notably the shoulder plate, rounded and softer, mimicking his crest. The most obvious references include the symbol being drawn directly onto the breastplate and the boots. His belt is another reference to it, containing the three circular buckles with rounded cloth falling underneath, forming a similar silhouette. The griffon crest is still incorporated, drawn onto the shoulder plate. The red and yellows also aided in creating an idea of fire, which I wanted in order to contrast with his connection to water.

Additionally, I wanted to give the character wing-like designs, while still maintaining the repeated motif of hands. To do this, I added repeated hands to the helmet in order to form the shape of a wing. This was originally added to the boots as well, however they were later removed as I felt that they distracted the viewer more than added to the character.
Finally, a small water spirit was placed with the character. The blue wisp represents the lady of the lake, referencing his interactions with her when he was tasked to throw the excalibur into the lake.

This character is still in progress. I'm planning to add a large, magical hand, to replace his missing one, along with more elements of fire surrounding it. The hands are designed to be made up of many smaller ones, with each miniature hand distorted and disproportionate to make up a section of a larger one. I wanted the hand to be fragmented, but for every part to work together as one. The hand is currently sculpted in Zbrush, but has yet to be retopologized and textured, and for fire to be added.

Ser Bedwyr was sculpted in Zbrush, then retopologized in Maya. The low poly character was then moved to Zbrush once more to add additional details that better fit the retopologized version. The model was textured in Substance Painter, and rigged in Maya.

Moonlit Giant

The Moonlit Giant is modeled entirely through Maya, focusing on lighting and material rather than colors and texturing.

The original idea of the Moonlit Giant was to create an environment that has lived through a disruption. I was very interested in the concept of destruction and apocalypse, so I came up with the narratives of a robot takeover, time freezing during a meteor shower, and the contrast between the populated past and an abandoned, overgrown future. I finally settled on the narrative of an ancient battle between a village and a giant, who is now frozen in space, since I found the composition in the thumbnail most dramatic and eye catching.

When greyboxing, my first goal was getting intense foreshortening on the giant's hand, and making the giant both fit in frame, but still feel very large and intimidating. I achieved this mostly through the camera by shifting the focal length to increase the size of the hand, playing with the depth of field to further push the giant back, and finally, placing the camera at a low angle to make the monster larger and more intimidating.To inform the viewer that the disruption happened in the past, I added the slow process of renovation. The houses affected by the attack have now started rebuilding, indicating that the villagers have begun to move on and move forward.

Fossilogical is a casual, singleplayer puzzle game that can be played in 30 minutes to an hour. Fossilogical was made in only a month, inspired by images of poorly made taxidermy.The player is a new intern at an underfunded museum and is given skeletons and fossils to reassemble, with very little description of the actual creature they’re supposed to be making. They get to choose to be creative by connecting bones illogically, or even adding random desk objects into the skeleton, to create a new kind of monster, or they can take the time to puzzle out the levels and figure out what the original creature was supposed to be and assemble it as cleanly as they can.

The original concept art was designed within the first week for a pitch, where we only needed to present the mechanics. At this point, we did not have the full narrative planned out. However, we decided what we wanted for the overall feel of the game, landing on cozy and humorous. I was tasked to create a basic design to reflect our goal, along with some standard layout ideas. I chose a style that was cell shaded and used lighter and more vibrant colors to capture the charm we envisioned.

Once the narrative and setting was decided– the player was a gecko in a world of amphibians and reptiles, I began a more in depth exploration of the style, specifically for character designs. The designs needed to remain simple and lowpoly, which worked well for the feeling we were going for and also the timeline we had.I tried to play with the shapes and exaggeration of the characters, personifying them and keeping them unrealistic. I found that the designs with longer limbs and slitted eyes gave too much of a mysterious undertone, so I stuck with the cuter, stubby character. Following this, I used the same base to design multiple different species, figuring out which species fit best with each character.

The bones were the most important aspect of the game. Each skeleton was based off of real life skeletons, before being simplified and, for later levels, distorted and altered. I had to play around with multiple ideas for how to display that distortion’s advancement with more than just shapes– a way to communicate with the player fully that the bones were strange. By playing around with color and pattern, I was able to achieve a smooth progression. The lizard’s deformations were inspired by the ankylosaurus and the narwhal was inspired by the helicoprion.

The largest challenge we faced was the scaling of difficulty. As the narrative progressed, the player was supposed to receive more and more distorted and strange bones, making it more difficult for them to figure out what the original creature was. Additionally, the amount of bones would increase, making the puzzle even harder. However, we found that even the skeletons in the earlier levels, notably the bat, had too many bones, overwhelming the player immediately. Through several different iterations, I removed several less important bones and merged some bones into one, creating an easier level and a more reasonable difficulty scale.The bat's wings were merged. The lizard's spine and shoulder bones were removed. The lizard's claws were combined into one. The tutorial fish's tail was also originally split into two before being combined.

Subway Sermons is a short, singleplayer roguelike deckbuilder that can be played in fifteen minutes. The player is a new member of a cult and would use their deck of cards to argue with passengers on a subway in an effort to recruit them. The game contains normal attack and defense cards, and numerous effect cards that have their own abilities. Players can freely explore three different train lines that each travel their own path and contain unique enemies and cards.

The design of this game was intended to be lighthearted and silly, following a ridiculous storyline. To reflect this, the design of both the environment and the characters are bright and saturated, using a relatively minimal color palette. Each train line is centered around a singular color, helping the player easily differentiate between the sections, and correlate the cards and the map to the specific line. For example, the Pulse line is red, therefore cards that are exclusive to the Pulse line are also red, and the pathway on the map shares the same color. Same can be seen with the green and blue trains.

The only character that has a more diverse color pallette is the player, with its bright turquoise eyes contrasting to the pink and purple, allowing the player to stand out amongst the crowd. Still, I wanted the player’s colors to remain simple, to prevent messiness that could occur if one area has too many colors compared to the rest of the environment. To still achieve the main focus on the character, there is only one point of contrast on the eyes, allowing it to pop out.