Madeline Urback Concept Art & Illustration 2020

"Valerie" was an extremely fun game to work on. I learned about tiling, gameplay, UI, character design, item design, programming logic, and environmental design from this game. Most importantly I learned how to take feedback and apply it. 

I have been working with Unity and Unreal the past few weeks and I would like to bring "Valerie" into Unity to begin pushing it forward. I have great plans for this game. One of the game design aspects I am most excited about is making the Girl Scout Cookies consumable. I would like the cookies to give the Girl Scout powers so that she can fight enemies more effectively than avoiding them. 

I can't wait to continue my journey in game dev, and I am excited to see where this journey takes me next.

FINAL DISCLAIMER: All of the art, animation, and programming in this game were done by me in the engine GDevlop and the art program Photoshop. The music is NOT my music. I found the main menu song on a free song website off of google. 

Digital Painting

"Renewable Magic" is a painting about a human who promised to protect the seas if mother nature herself would give her a chance at eternal life. Mother nature made a deal with her in the form of a fox gifting her with a tail. Every new season the fox brings renewed energy so that the newly made mermaid can continue to protect all that live beneath. 

City Lights is a painting I did inspired off of bright colorful Japanese artwork combined with a VRChat 3D Model I was heavily inspired by.

Character Design

Mourning is a character for a card game I am developing called "Afterlife". Mourning is one of the first cards I have worked on for the development of this game.

Mourning - The Grave Whisperer

Backstory: Mourning’s childhood was filled with immeasurable amounts of sadness. Her family seemed to be haunted by demons draining the life of her loved ones. Her family was plagued with illness after illness causing her to eventually be sent to an orphanage because there was no one left to take care of her. After moving into the old orphanage her closest friends would get sick shortly after her meeting them. Death followed her friends everywhere she went.

Day after day her mind was tortured by a never-ending pain of grief. She eventually felt that she had no other choice than to be-friend death so that she could make peace with her miserable life. Mourning embraced death and took a job as a moirologist when she was old enough. Mourning suffered through countless deaths eventually making her numb to all feelings of grief. This caused her to take the lives of others voluntarily so that she could make more money as a professional mourner.

Mourning made deals with funerals to help them gain money through the deaths of others. Helping the funerals were the only thing left that gave her a sense of who she was. Eventually, Mourning was hunted down and killed by an assassin who had claimed that Mourning had taken the lives of everyone he had ever loved (this assassin is the Human card “Demon Slayer”) Mourning’s time on earth was filled with relentless amounts of evil, therefore sentencing her to a life in hell became well deserved.

Today, Mourning hangs around funerals on earth trying to make them more miserable than they already are by playing pranks on the people who only wish to grieve in peace.

Personality: Mourning is absolutely crazy insane and chaotic. What she says often doesn't make sense to others. She is reckless and terrifying. She also likes cracking morbid and dark-humored jokes. Mourning tends to make others uncomfortable with every sentence that leaves her mouth.

Development of Mourning

My mentor David Tenario knows my love for Riot Games splash art. He looked into finding ways to help me develop her based off of a character development technique by John Polidora to find the most efficient character design based off of who Mourning is as a character.

"BCA" Thumbnail

Next, I chose my two thumbnails from above. I chose "BCA" because it was my favorite thumbnail design-wise. The reference photos below and to the left are from Pinterest. I do not own them.

"CAB" Thumbnail

I also chose "CAB" because That is a design I usually would not choose, but it was an interesting concept. I thought that choosing something that I was not used to painting would result in expanding my creativity. The reference photos below and to the left are from Pinterest. I do not own them.

Final Full Body

Janet - The Lost Miner In Space

Janet is the main character design that I worked on as a Lead Artist in the Game Development Club at the College of Dupage. She appears in the game "A Miner Problem". Other artists worked on this game as well as programmers. Find that information here - https://gdc-of-cod.itch.io/a-miner-problem

Animated Music Video Concept

Here is a collection of characters and a storyboard for a fan animated music video I am animating. I finished a short animatic as well. The song is Moments by MitiS. I do not own the music, only the art.

I worked on communicating a sad yet hopeful tone through my storyboards. I wanted to show the life of a girl named Sky who had wonderful moments with her family however that all falls apart and the thing that helps her survive the dark ones are moments shared with friends and nature.