I'm currently Senior Art Director on Ellen's Garden Restoration, my first experience working directly with an external IP. This project is one that I started on from the very beginning, through World-Wide launch, and still going strong. Some examples of exteriors I've Art Directed are included here along with the DIY Workshops. The DIY workshop needed interior and exterior work areas where a player could work on DIY projects that were either furniture-focused or plant-focused. Managing the Art Team on this game has kept me very busy, specially the first few months as the 3D Artists had to learn how to use SpeedTree to make our foliage. It was a challenge to set up a schedule that would allow for folks to learn the software while also hitting deadlines that would keep us moving towards our goals.
The work shown here was not done by me, they were done by other members of my team. These particular images are from tasks that were closely Art Directed by me.
Home Design Makeover was a big deal for Storm8 because it was one of our first games built in Unity and I had to learn it on the fly along with the rest of my team. I was brought on to the game as Art Director when it was just a prototype and I had to get things polished up and establish a pipeline for our in-house team and outsourcing vendors. This project was a challenge because I was heavily involved in learning Unity early on then I had to balance creating production art and overseeing the Art Team. I designed a large amount of rooms, put rooms together in Unity, created character art, established a pipeline, and was heavily involved with the Outsourcing department as they vested vendors. I was lucky to have worked alongside Suzie Greene before she retired and the knowledge I got from her allowed me to navigate this fast faced production and never fail to meet any goals or deadlines.
As the project matured I was able to take on the task of prototyping features, usually on my own or with one other Artist, which were then added to the game and helped to increase revenue. After around three years working on Home Design, I moved on to a new project and trained an Art Lead to take on my responsibilities.
Dragon Story 2 was the first large project that I was Art Lead on after joining Storm8. I was brought on to get the Art Team going from day 1 and led them on a six month long journey to get us to a world-wide launch. Sadly, the game was never fully released even though it was fully ready but the team put in a great effort and it’s a project that I remember fondly. A big challenge with this game was that we were using an outdated proprietary game engine which was cumbersome and not very powerful compared to something like Unity. We had to come up with a 3D/2D hybrid pipeline for the dragons in order to get the game to function but things ended up working out in the end. I was involved early on in concepting before starting to focus more on the management of the Art Team as we staffed up for full production.
Fish Frenzy Mania was my introduction to match 3 games as an Art Lead, an the first project I was assigned to at Storm8. This was a fun introduction to the more casual market, something that I was unfamiliar with at the time. It was a small project with the quick production cycle of three months, so things were moving quickly. While the fish/ocean theme had already been decided on prior to me joining, I had to come up with the visuals and stablish a pipeline for a small team of three to four artists. This game is fun to reminisce about because it goes back to the days of simple game making with 2D assets and Flash animation, and my daughter was born while I was working on it.
