Speech Bubble

Last week I showed some portraits of the first characters the player meets in Funtactix’ “The Hunger Games Adventures“. Here are a few more portraits, of “generic” people from District 12, and of lovely Effie and Cinna from the Capitol:

In addition to portraits, I’ve also been working on illustrations that appear before each chapter in the game, giving a hint of what’s happening in it. Here are the illustrations for chapters 2, 3, 4 and 6:

I’d like to give kudos to the Funtactix team – and in my case especially to Amir Lotan, the product manager in charge of the game, who works closely with me despite the time difference between Israel and New York. He knows how to explain exactly what he needs, and adds references, helpful examples and even rough mockups sometimes. Moreover, he has the ability to pinpoint the problems in a sketch and to give the right direction to solve them. It’s easier for clients who are part of the industry and understand the art and gaming world, but it still shouldn’t be taken for granted, and it makes my work much easier and more pleasant.

Aviv

“The Hunger Games Adventures”, the Facebook game by Israeli game company Funtactix, based on the movie by Lionsgate, is online for over a week now, and I can start showing some stuff I created for it. My part was mainly character design and illustration, and the rest of the art (environments, items, 3D, UI design) is the work of Funtactix’s very talented designers, both in Israel and overseas.

The first step was coming up with a general look for characters in the game, and when that was approved I created head designs for all the characters, based on references from the movie. In the end, the characters’ look in the game is pretty different from the original design, and either way, since this is concept art, I’m still checking whether I can even show these pieces.

After capturing each character’s essence into a relatively simple head design (it has to be clear on a small avatar in the game), I started working on painted portraits, which appear when the player interacts with another character, for example when given a new quest. Here are the first four character the player meets in the first act: Katniss, Peeta, Gale and Primrose.

All the art for the game had to be approved by Funtactix (obviously) and by Lionsgate as well, but the main characters’ portraits also required approval by the actors themselves, so Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and other fine folk reviewed my art on its way to the game. Cool. Cool, cool cool.

Speaking of stardust: the Hollywood launch was decorated with big-ass prints of the poster I drew. Can’t really take full credit for this poster, because it’s actually a paintover: I got the composition all set on a huge Photoshop file, with the mockingjay in the background and Katniss in front of it, and worked on top of that to get the art style of the game, and to turn real-Katniss into game-Katniss. It’s still pretty damn cool to see it every time I play the game on Facebook.

There’s new content being added to the game all the time, so check it out!

www.playthga.com

Aviv