I art directed this Star Wars branded idle action RPG. I started as the sole artists at the inception, grew the central art team, then sourced and built strong relationships with 3 external developers (characters, VFX, and animation). The challenge was to visualize a game from its most raw inception and create a viable production plan as it moved into larger external development hands. This meant it needed to be rock solid in tech, art direction, business, and culture - each area I helped grow into something quite special. The project was an internal success and its pipeline was production ready. Although the project did not move forward due to forces larger than us, the project itself was an opportunity for me to show I could, in a vacuum, grow a project from zero to production ready on my own.
Game Pitch
Game Pitch
The first task was to show at a high level what the game could look like. I partnered with Balisti/Triggerfish (based in South Africa) to produce this pre-rendered pitch video. I wrote the script, created animatics, sourced the dev partner, and acted as the director/biz dev/producer each step of the way. The result was an internal approval to move forward on both the game idea, art direction, and game conceit.
I laid out the project planning from this stage forward, giving the team a clear blueprint to build upon. This is an instrumental approach I take to nearly everything done on the project.
Death Star Gameplay
Playable Prototype
The idea I developed for the art direction was that the world is akin to collectible action figures and playsets. This fit well with the portrait mode camera developed during the prototype phase, and gave the game a unique take on a well storied franchise. Plastic surfaces, toy photography, and lighthearted approach to animation helped bring the idea to life.
Visual Target
Visual Target
I set up our pipeline with hard exit criteria, not to move forward until each were duly satisfied. One early goal was the Visual Target. We challenged ourselves to produce a game-ready playable environment (on device) that could theoretically be shipped (this is before pre-pro). The only way a visual target is viable is for the underlying tech to be possible. This example shows of the modular building system we created (using Houdini), the lighting quality we were after, and the general stylization of form.
previs combat
Jedi Fight
Boss Fight
Scripted Combat
Combat Planning
I created several animatics using basic shapes to help visualize complex combat animation concepts. This helped inform both design and engineering, to understand how to make abstract concepts of scripted combat and pre-determined outcomes appear theatrical and entertaining. I documented how the visuals broke down into rules and priorities that we could build the game upon. This gave the team a jumping off point that resulted in the final playable game.
Environments
A sampling of the environments in various stages across the game. I had the concept artists learn Blender and utilized full 3D for much of their work, resulting in stronger, more 'true to game' images. With such a small team it was important to have the most concrete direction as early as possible to avoid future iteration.
Characters
Characters at their various stages of development. We went through 3 rounds of variations on characters, each building on what looks best in gameplay and would service the game's action figure conceit.