I’m putting this page here for anybody that is wondering what the heck I actually do besides drawing a bunch of doodles. As someone who’s always preferred to work in small teams, there’s a lot of various skills to cover and learn during the process of making anything. I’ll try my best to cover all of the areas I feel pretty confident about.

Career Brief

I started my career at a startup called Z2 back in 2011. I worked on Battle Nations for 4 years, then Paradise Bay for another 2-3 years. The last year or so before Z2 shutdown, I worked on a bunch of prototypes and pitches that never saw the light of day. During that eight year stretch, Z2 became a King studio, which in turn became an Activision studio. And now everything is Microsoft.

When Z2 shut down in 2019, a few of us stragglers decided to start a new studio called Perfect Day. We’ve been surviving the 2020s with a few odd jobs here and there, most notably launching games such as Eight Era and Temple Run: Puzzle Adventure. We also released a board game featuring our own IP - Robot Quest Arena. I’m still here.

Creative Direction

Visualizing a game not only from an art perspective, but as a whole entity in the way it feels, sounds, and vibes is what I’m really into. As I’ve mentioned I prefer working in small teams, I’ve had the privilege in my career to work closely with designers, programmers, animators, musicians, and product owners to curate better experiences. As a creative director, I’ve been involved in crafting pitches, writing instructive documentation, and creating mood boards to set the tone.

Implementation

If I could make a whole entire game by myself, I would. But, uh, I’m not very good at programming. The next best option is to implement as much as I can in a game engine and iterate until I’m satisfied with the outcome. I’m most familiar with the Unity game engine and I generally understand the ins and outs of 2d and 3d game production.

This is a room from Robot Quest. Here I created all of the textures and applied them to materials so they can be slapped onto simple geometry. Next, I placed a bunch of props around the arena to fill out the scene. Different types of lighting (global, shapes, sprites) were applied to give it a nice sunset feel. Finally, VFX were made and implemented such of blowing rose petals and god rays. I still need to make some cheering crowds. . .

UI

I’ve never officially been a UI artist on a project, but I’ve done my fair share of prototyping and concepting for what UI could look like. I’ve also done a ton of icons for just about every project I’ve worked on. After 15 years, probably thousands at this point.

This is one slide from a UI style guide presentation I put together. It shows the direction for how I want icons to look in Robot Quest. This was used to help onboard other UI artists that would join the team.

VFX

VFX is something I’ve picked up later in my career at Perfect Day. We were just making Robot Quest with a very small team, so I volunteered to learn it. At first it was just taking VFX asset packages from the Unity Store and plugging prefabs in where necessary. After breakiing down the prefabs and seeing how they were made, I decided to just make them from scratch. They were obviously pretty bad at first, but I was allowed to make a bunch of mistakes early on. When we landed a project called Eight Era, I decided to throw myself into the fire and become the VFX artist for it. I did all of the VFX for the numerous heroes in that game. Over the next couple of years I got a lot better to the point that I’m quite confident with it now. I currently do all of the VFX for Robot Quest.