ZOMBIE RECESS - CASE STUDY

Sketch to Concept AI Workflows This case study highlights the development of custom AI architectures designed to accelerate the concept art pipeline. The core philosophy behind this workflow is to empower artists rather than replace them, utilizing AI as a high-powered rendering engine that respects and elevates bespoke, hand-drawn foundations.

• Artist-Driven Foundation: The process begins with an original, hand-drawn sketch to establish the character's unique pose, silhouette, and attitude, ensuring the creative vision remains entirely in the hands of the artist.

• Custom Node-Based Architecture: I designed a complex, node-based AI pipeline (utilizing tools like ComfyUI) to process the initial sketch. This custom architecture bridges the original line art with specific styling prompts and reference models, functioning as an automated rendering pass to generate high-fidelity lighting, textures, and materials.

• Polished Final Execution: The pipeline outputs a highly developed concept piece, which then requires only minimal final paint-over and refinement in Photoshop to achieve a production-ready, stylized 3D aesthetic. This drastically reduces rendering time while preserving the original artistic intent.

Project Overview: Concept Illustration AI Workflows This case study demonstrates how to multiply an artist's output by integrating AI into the production art pipeline to create fully composed key art illustrations. Applied here to the Zombie Recess mobile game revamp, this workflow uses AI to accelerate the translation of bespoke, hand-drawn sketches into vibrant, 3D marketing assets that are benchmarked against other AAA game productions.

• Artist-Led Foundation: The illustration is built entirely on bespoke groundwork, starting with individual, hand-drawn character sketches and a detailed environmental layout of a playground. This ensures the artist completely dictates the initial pose, attitude, and spatial composition before any rendering occurs.

• Directed AI Generation: Stable Diffusion was utilized to process the foundational sketches and establish the groundwork art. Rather than relying on random generation, the models were strictly trained using custom art direction notes for the environmental composition and explicitly guided by the defined color palette swatches.

• Comprehensive Tool Integration: The workflow seamlessly blends traditional drafting with an advanced AI stack—incorporating ComfyUI, Stable Diffusion, Grok, Nano Banana, and Gemini. By leveraging Grok-assisted style guides alongside these rendering engines, the pipeline rapidly synthesizes the raw sketches into a highly polished, unified marketing illustration.

Game Design Docs to High-Fidelity Gameplay Prototyping Using the gameplay concept developed for the Zombie Recess revamp, this case study demonstrates the process of translating raw design docs and artistic groundwork into high-fidelity mockups. The goal was to rapid-prototype a viable gameplay loop, combining cinematic action and functional UI design to validate the player experience before going into full engine production.

• The Creative Groundwork: The prototype is based on the characters (Blaze, Malibu, Dex) and the playground environmental playground. Rather than generating random visual assets, this stage utilized specific GDD parameters (such as a 3D in-game camera, high swarming behavior, and card-based resource loops) to directly establish the tactical framework.

• High-Fidelity "In-Engine" Visual Mockups: To prove out the 3D aesthetic and camera perspective, a mock gameplay screen was engineered to simulate a live match. Under dark, atmospheric twilight lighting, the image stages the multi-level defensive battle with high-dynamic, "in-game" action VFX and character animation pipelines that honor the original art direction.

• Rapid UI/UX Prototyping: A crucial step was validating player interaction through a mock-up card system interface on the HUD. Drawing inspiration from successful tower defense models like Plants vs. Zombies or Clash Royale, a clear inventory of defense options was quickly assembled (the Medical Kit, Fire Bomb, Water Cannon, and Water Balloons) alongside active resource tracking (such as "Resource" or Energy meters) and dynamic game status indicators.

< Back to Home