CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A group of students gathers around a table in the basement of the Campus Instructional Facility at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, looking at boxes filled with beetles, walking sticks, spiders, dragonflies and other insects.
The collection belongs to the Illinois Natural History Survey, and Tommy McElrath, the insect collection manager and a research scientist in entomology, is describing giant predacious diving beetles that swim around looking for prey. He tells the students about ancient dragonflies with wingspans of 2-3 meters that propelled themselves by squeezing water from their rectums and that had a “face mask” that unfolded to allow the dragonflies to open their jaws. He describes insects that look like tree branches and insects that live in caves and have no eyes.
The students are searching for inspiration for what creatures might look like on a swampy alien planet. They are designing the characters and environment for a Concept Art for Video Games class offered through Illinois Informatics and taught by Michael Curtin, the innovation coordinator for campus information technology and a former video game industry artist.
It is Curtin’s third time teaching the 8-week class, which will expand to 16 weeks in the spring semester. He tells me that he aims to give students insight into how the video game industry works, including collaborating to produce a cohesive design.
A video game concept artist uses the storyline to design the look and feel of a game. They visualize the characters, costumes, environment, creatures, plants, shelters and weapons. In the industry, that work provides a clearly defined vision for a 3-D artist to use in animating the game. “It’s world-building,” Curtin says.
His students create thumbnail sketches first, then develop them into black-and-white renderings, then full color versions of their designs, along with an asset sheet that shows how the work evolved, that they can use in a portfolio. They can see each other’s work on Figma, an online whiteboard, and the class focuses on collaboration, communication and the real-world dynamics of work changing hands toward a shared outcome, Curtin says.
“Each student looks at what they are designing, how it impacts someone else’s work and how to incorporate their ideas into each other’s designs. It’s understanding how a character or vehicle or environment fits into the whole,” he tells me.
Curtin writes a basic storyline for the class. This fall, it’s an adventure game in which a character was sent to a swampy planet to reestablish its failed mining operation. He automates everything, puts himself in stasis and doesn’t awaken until years later when Clementine, the game’s protagonist, arrives on the planet. She must fight to save her new home from False Teeth, a long-dormant creature that is stalking them to get back an ancient artifact granting complete control over technology.
The students choose what they will design from prompts Curtin has written, including descriptions of the main characters, the abandoned mining camp, a scouting bot, a diner in ruins and an animatronic cow skeleton.
Siobhan McKissic, the design and materials research librarian for the Ricker Library of Architecture and Art, also is at the concept art class on this day. McKissic shows the students fabric, paper and other items made from tree bark, pineapple tops, banana peels and hemp. She says the materials can help them think about what their characters could make from what they find in the environment around them.
Graphic design student Lily Choi is taking the class for the second time. She says the class has challenged her to draw things she wouldn’t otherwise think of and to work in new ways.
“I think I’ve matured a lot because of the structure and challenge of each weekly assignment,” as well as working as part of a design team in the class, she says.
Choi says she focused on drawing the abandoned mining camp as a collection of treehouses connected with a series of pulley systems that the miners would have used to travel and move tools between them. She tells me she was influenced by the presentations by McElrath and McKissic to incorporate organic materials, and she views the human settlement as similar to a beehive. She says she also was inspired to revise her drawing by a classmate’s design of a monster.
“It made me take on a more eerie vibe to the environment. I think the game should complement the theme, which is swampy, scary and abandoned, like something terrible happened here,” she says.
Anna Fedczuk, a computer science plus advertising major, designed a vibrant green False Teeth, which she imagines having soil and plants accumulated along its long, massive body, along with dry, scaly patches that look like bark. She tells me that she modeled the body on that of a centipede and its backward-facing fingers on that of a koala’s hands. The creature’s face was inspired by a creepy mask from a Japanese festival, and the tentacles peeking out from around the mask were inspired by the star-nosed mole, she says.
“It looks like part of its environment, so you can lose sight of it and it’s hidden,” Fedczuk says.
She tells me she likes being able to describe to the class in detail what she was thinking in her design process. After hearing her talk about her design, Curtin says, “The job of the concept artist is to be a walking file cabinet of cool-looking stuff. This tells a much more compelling story with all the plant life. I can see how the character viscerally connects with its environment.”
Vi Manova, a costume design and technology major, took inspiration from McElrath’s visit in designing “Bug Clementine,” their version of the game’s main character who wears a cape modeled after the jewel bug’s protective shield that covers its wings and abdomen. They designed the pattern of the cape based on the harlequin beetle’s elaborate markings.
“I like to take inspiration from natural, real-world elements,” Manova says. “Insects often have fascinating patterns and colors, but since they tend to be so small, those colors and patterns are rarely seen by most people. I find that using these small creatures as inspiration for patterns and colors is a great way to introduce something unique but also natural in a design.”
Curtin tells me his goal is to give students the experience of working on a team as they would in the video game industry, and this group has successfully engaged with the project and one another.
“Like everything in game development, it’s a group sport. Everyone works towards a common goal, iteratively pushing the quality of the product higher and higher with the time and people you have available,” he says. “I want students to see this in action and truly internalize it.”