Summing Up of Project

Rock Icon

The brief was to create a ‘1^st Concept Phase’ of a karaoke style singing game for Sony Computer Entertainment called ‘Rock Icon’

Having worked in the games industry for 2 years I was able to call upon and use my experience in creating a section of the game, in terms of look and navigational flow.

I first looked at other games and various graphic styles to create a mood board and core value sheet to represent what the game was about. I wanted to move away from the slick graphic style that is seen in a lot of singing games and create a more textured illustrative feel that mirrored the nostalgic feel of the game as a lot of the music is from various eras of the past interspersed with present day bands.

Once the style had been set I started looking at the game flow and chose a section of the game (Rock Styles) to visualise and animate showing how the game would look and navigate (user interface). A series of menu screens and in-game graphics were created and an animatic of the game flow was produced.

A game such as Rock Icon would usually take between 7-8 months to produce; the first 2 months would be spent on creating a ‘look and feel’, firstly creating mood boards and core value sheets that are used as a guide to what you want the game to aspire too and then producing visuals of menu screens and in-game graphics.

A team of usually 3 or 4 graphic designers would be used to create all the graphics, which is where my skills come into play. Once a style has been set then the graphic designers would start working alongside games designers, coders to produce the assets to be put in-game.

The aim of the project was to produce a series of work that show cases my creativity and design skills to prospective employers.