MayvNocturne

Heya,

My name is Kelly Blades and I am a Game Art and Design (GAD) student at the Art Institute of Vancouver (Ai). This is my second year of the program and I graduate in June. It is not very long before I am looking for a job in the gaming industry!

The biggest project of the GAD program at Ai is the GPW (Game Production Workshop, or Game Prototype Workshop). For 6 months, a team comprised of Designers, Artists, and Programmers work together to make a game in an environement that would simulate our working envionment out in the gaming industry. Well, our team managed to grab an animator and some audio students to be a part of our team as well, and I believe our team is sitting at around 30 students. Our class is supervised by our instructor, Jason Elliot, who is always there to provide us advice and feedback.

If you are reading this you probably have already taken a look our GPW project - Tikiwiki. For the longest time it was called FireWater, until we could come up with a solid name. There is a number a reasons why we decided to call it TikiWiki, though we can explore that a different time.

On the GPW project, I have taken two roles - the Interface Designer and the Art Director.

As an Interface Designer, I designed the Front End and the HUD and I am currently creating our own font for the game. I had to make lots of mockups to show each screen and each HUD element. I worked on a lot of documents describing the specifics of how each screen or HUD element works. These are important because after I am done with it the artists and programmers get their hands on it to make the design a reality.

As Art Director, I am tasked with managing the Art Team and giving them tasks. In this position, I am also responsible for communicating between all of the teams - lots!

Thank you for reading this little bit about myself and I hope that you continue to watch TikiWiki.

Kelly Blades