Zoe Kissinger

For the past few years I’ve been working on a personal project called Spiral Bound. It’s an idea for a fantasy game about a painter and her dog who must leave their home for the first time after disaster strikes. Together they’ll travel the world, make friends, find inspiration, and perhaps discover the source of the disaster. For my senior thesis, I wanted to create a game ready model for Sienna, who is the story’s protagonist. I mentioned previously that she’s a painter, so I wanted to depict that in her outfit. She’s gone through many design changes over the years, as shown in the last slide. I was struggling to find a good balance between fantasy and practical when it came to her clothes. I ultimately decided to create an outfit that reflected her vocation as a painter but also seemed comfortable and easy to travel in.

This was my winning entry for the College for Creative Studies 2025 Sculpt off! In this challenge we were given five hours to sculpt a character following the prompt “Lost in Time”. The obvious route was to go with something time travel related, but I wanted to do something different. I realized something that was lost in time was the reverence humanity had for nature, and with it, belief in spirits or creatures connected to nature faded too. I decided to create a fae creature navigating nature in today’s time, which unfortunately includes a lot of trash. She has been forced to adapt. Her dress is made of a candy bar wrapper and her belt is a usb and aux cord. Her hair is fastened in place with a clothes pin. The staff she carries is a straw, and she’s stepping over some cigarette butts, a bottle cap, and a bread clip.

The pièce de résistance of my Junior year at CCS. I wanted to take a crack at making a whole game ready character. I had come up with a little avatar for myself earlier that year (it’s featured as the profile picture for my ArtStation), so I decided to use that as a basis, including the simple greyscale color palette. I incorporated a lot of myself into this design. I wear glasses on my head a lot and often have my hair in a ponytail. I love big hoodies and my belt bag that I always carry with me, and I love my converse sneakers! 
To add some interest to the design, I decided to give her a mechanical arm and leg. My username is CosmicZozo, so I thought some Sci-Fi flare would do the design some good too. This assignment was also my first real attempt at hard surface sculpting. I found that I enjoy imagining how the machine parts would work together. Since I want to work in the game industry, I included the buttons you’d commonly find on game controllers on the mechanical limbs. There’s a D-pad on her left leg, and the four circular buttons you’d find on most gaming controllers on her right arm. 
When it came down to rendering the character, I couldn’t decided if I liked the lit or unlit version better. I decided to include both, as I think they both have their strengths!

This vulture cat is a creature based on a paleontology design challenge. Basically we were given the skull of a randomly assigned animal and design an entire creature that would fit that skull. I was given a rabbit skull, and due to the nature of the front teeth, I noticed how bird like it was. This inspired me to create a nightmare bird like creature. I took inspiration primarily from vultures since I wanted this creature to look like it would be found eating roadkill or digging through the trash. I didn’t want this creature to appear noble or majestic at all, and I think I achieved that!

For this assignment in Winter 2024, I was tasked with making a game ready asset. At the time I was deep into my Dark Urge play through of Baldur’s Gate 3, and was thinking of a design for a crown the Dark Urge could have worn when they were the leader of the murder cult. I decided to go all in with this design, and took inspiration from the design of a sigil found throughout the Dark Urge play through. The crown features the same runes, as well as the same amount of blood drops as the sigil. The icon of Bhaal (the lord of murder in the forgotten realms universe) sits in the center of a metal piece inspired by the weapons used by the cult’s current leader, Orin.

In my winter 2024 semester I did a simulated art test. In addition to the final product, we were graded on our email etiquette and the documentation of our progress. In the art test I was tasked with making a pauldron for the character Karlach from Baldur’s Gate. I decided to try and blend it seamlessly with her existing starter armor. I had a lot of fun doing research into the character’s backstory as well as the world she comes from and incorporating that into the design.