I already had created stuff for and with Ace before I created his stream intro for him. I decided to be very bold and confront him on his stream quality as he had simple generic graphics for him stream. I showed him what I could do for him and he thankfully didn't show me the finger for being cheeky about his stream.
Getting going, I gathered up any assets I had available to me, dug up my old files and pieced together a story. Ace liked the idea of retro, neon buzz type graphics so I came up with this. The arcade machine booting up is synonymous with his stream starting, and him playing it is how he plays games for his stream. Very simple.
Technical wise, The assets such as the machine, the poker chip and the mural wall were all sourced online as 3D elements and altered to fit the colour theme. These were only available to use within Adobe After Effects' Beta build which now allows 3D assets to be used and edited.
The character of Ace is made by simple shape layers and animated using position, rotation values. He is not rigged or anything complicated like that. The headphones on his head are 3D too and are masked out to fit around his head in a realistic way.
Aside from the obvious 3D assets, I wanted to make the scene feel as if it's in a 3D space, I used different lighting within After Effects and "effect"-ive shading to add some depth.
Safe to say, he loved it, and still uses it to this day.