Apex Legends from Respawn Entertainment has exploded onto the gaming scene with unprecedented force, drawing players of many years of First Person Shooter experience. And with many new players wanting to learn, they turn to teachers.
Enter a member of the original Titanfall community and online FPS teacher; FrothyOmen, otherwise known as Frothy. Myself being a member of his community during Titanfall 2, LawBreakers, Quake Champions and now Apex Legends there is always much to learn and teach from his Twitch livestreams and extensive Youtube channel of educational game content. And with the ever shifting quality of content on the platform, artists are offering to help add and improve upon it. And this is where Frothy himself reached out to me for a special on his largest video yet.
With Frothy now past the 100,000 Subscriber milestone on Youtube a special video was in order, and with the guide of a whats called "Tier List" for all of the Legends available in the game some creative references to the subject at hand is pleasing to watch in the video. This led to the mentality of how the development of the asset construction was made.
Enter a member of the original Titanfall community and online FPS teacher; FrothyOmen, otherwise known as Frothy. Myself being a member of his community during Titanfall 2, LawBreakers, Quake Champions and now Apex Legends there is always much to learn and teach from his Twitch livestreams and extensive Youtube channel of educational game content. And with the ever shifting quality of content on the platform, artists are offering to help add and improve upon it. And this is where Frothy himself reached out to me for a special on his largest video yet.
With Frothy now past the 100,000 Subscriber milestone on Youtube a special video was in order, and with the guide of a whats called "Tier List" for all of the Legends available in the game some creative references to the subject at hand is pleasing to watch in the video. This led to the mentality of how the development of the asset construction was made.
Bangalore Default Skin --------------------------------------------------- Bangalore Illustrated Asset
The idea behind the making of these assets was a black and white monochrome base and using character unique accent colors to bring unique flare to each unique Legend that is in the game. This includes elements such as unique ability factors (Bangalore's backpack mounted Smoke Launcher, and Smoke Canisters), hair, and armor pieces. Things otherwise deemed as mundane compared to other legends will be comprised of a black base colour with white separation layers and break up what would otherwise be a rather boring layout.
Each character was made by taking a screenshot of the character inside the Skin Selection screen of the main menu, importing to Adobe Illustrator, and doing first White accenting layers, Coloured accenting layers, then the Black base layer as a general approach for developing these assets. Each one of these characters when finished were sized up using the vector properties, then exported out at over 4K resolutions for Frothy to use, as Sony Vegas Studios cannot leverage vector files and thus needed .PNG files that he could downscale for his 4K video uploads without any image compression.
Legend Cards & Tier Rating
So with the unique crafting of each Legend out of the way, time to move onto a presentable way to list them in context of the video with the related footage on Frothy's end. With the example of Octane, who got released into the game with a companion Legend Briefing trailer that shows his abilities we agree'd that using a similar format would be pleasing to keep consistency with the Apex Legends aesthetic. Utilizing a black semi-transparent background with bold sans-serif font (Duke Fill) and a remade Apex Legends logo to fit in where the ability icon would be to show the prominence of the character described. To further make a distinction was a accent colour matched accent bar on the top of the Legend box. The tier box (describing which rating level they are at) is much simpler, using letter ratings with a white accent bar for flexibility.
THE FINAL PRODUCT
With all of the description of how these assets were made for Frothy's video, now you can go watch how he used them all together in his video on rating each Legend in the game. I hope that you have learned something from my design process and that you will also learn more about Apex Legends through Frothy. Please visit myself on my Twitch Livestreams at ShawttyGunz since I made each of these assets live there, and Frothy for more educational content on Youtube and Twitch.
Enjoy.
