I specialise in most aspects of art; environments, characters, rigging, animation, props, textures and technical art.
My main tools are Blender, Unity, Python and C#.
Please scroll down to see some examples of my work on some of the projects I've been involved with.
I am available for freelance work so please get in touch if you're interested in working together!
Critter Cove is a combination life sim and town builder game with a beautiful, handcrafted open world to explore.
I integrated into a small established team. My initial role was review and change the lighting system to showcase the existing assets in the best light possible. This came with unique challenges as the game had been developed using the "Azure[Sky] - Dynamic Skybox" unity plugin, which although comprehensive was difficult to customise and missing some features important to the art direction of the game.
Whilst reviewing the lighting aspects I also formulated a proposal to optimise the game in a scalable way. The proposal was agreed and working with the lead programmer Jason Holding we managed to develop a system enabling us go, not only from poor to great FPS on desktop hardware but also solid FPS on handhelds like Switch and Steam Deck.
The main component of the optimisation was to bake all suitable textures into texture arrays, bake the array index into the mesh, then divide the world into chunks and merge the meshes. The shaders all had to have a texture array version created and the material properties (such as colour tints) baked into look up tables.
To further increase performance for low spec hardware I baked the ambient light data and reflection probes at different times of day then blended between them as the time passed, and where possible moved the post processing into the shaders.
Critter Cove is due to be released to steam early access Q1 2024.
Follow these links for more information:
https://www.visitcrittercove.com
https://twitter.com/crittercovegame
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1631470/Critter_Cove
Crackernuts is a new Hairy Heart Games project, currently under development funded by Innovate UK's Creative Catalyst programme.
It is a narrative game about a goat-headed girl and her sister, a no-bodied head. They are on quest to find themselves and rescue their village from a curse of darkness.
The game features hand-crafted environments and puppets. These have been digitally scanned to create 3D game models. Our characters are animated by live actors, using cutting edge motion capture technology. All together this makes a unique and beautiful videogame.
I used blender to process 3d scans of environments, props and characters created by Fergus Dunnet, Neve Pearce and Gretchen Maynard for use in Unity. Rigged the characters, setup the cameras and lighting, cleaned up the motion capture, then worked in collaboration with Joe Bain and Marlon Stein to bring everything together in game.
"Leap straight into fast-paced, arcade FPS action with Heroes of Forever for VR! Prepare to travel across time and space to purge a corruption that is creeping across dimensions: go solo or team up in four-player co-op mode as you shoot your way through an infinitely expandable range of levels, unravelling the mysteries of the multiverse." - Trailer
I worked on art and tech art in this project, developing new levels and characters, optimising existing scenes and creating pipelines to increase efficiency for the team.
Follow these links for more information:
Lucky Mountain Games Twitter
Lucky Mountain Games Linktree
Litta Hunters is a mobile game designed to help save the planet by turning mobile gamers into citizen scientists.
Joining a small and established team, my role was to streamline pipelines, add missing features and offer guidance and support to the art team where needed.
Great character models had already been completed by Steveen Molina, which along with Carrie Taylor I used to build a new system to deliver maximum reusability and customisation.
We developed a shader that uses a gradient remapping system and overlays to deliver maximum variations with minimum work. The shader uses vertex offsets masked by vertex colours driven by a simple script to add secondary motion to movement and animations.
I also re-rigged and re-animated the characters and attachments, I then set up an animation controller to work with a new battle system and created some custom effects.
Currently Litta Hunters remains under development.
Follow these links for more information:
https://www.littahunt.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/LittaHunters
https://www.instagram.com/littahunters/
Keyser Swaps is a WebGL multiplayer collectable card game.
The idea was developed by Sam Rowen, working within a very limited budget I worked alongside Joe Bain as Hairy Heart Games to bring this game to life.
Sam Rowen is a concept artist with a film background. He provided concepts and rough high poly models which I made suitable for real time games, I also built and lit the game scene, set up shaders, and animated.
I also assisted Connor Aitken with the UI and Damion Sheppard with hooking his audio up effectively to my animations.
Find the game here.
A Meta Quest game developed by Moon Mode. Spacefolk City is a virtual reality city building game set in space. It's your job to save the space folk from a dying sun by building a city to house them as they figure out a way to escape.
Moon Mode is a tiny team so in consideration of this I implemented a very low friction pipeline and custom blender tools. It was key to be able to produce all the assets needed for a city builder and allow for fast iteration, especially as game design for both VR and city builders are hard to get right the first time.
Being an native Meta Quest game the resources we had were very limited especially considering the need to maintain at least a consistent 72FPS. I monitored performance and continually ensured that the assets created were going to be usable in a game where players have the ability to keep adding more and more assets as part of the game.
I built and animated the base characters, going through several iterations in order to maintain acceptable performance levels. We arrived at the decision to use vertex animated textures for the limbs with interchangeable bodies and heads (which did not deform).
I also worked on many other assets alongside @Runeax and Art Director Therese Pierrau.
Find the game here.
An Apple Arcade game developed by That Silly Studio.
Game of Thrones : Tale of Crows is an idle game. You play as the commander on the Night's Watch and the game progresses constantly, even when you're not playing. When you go back to check on the game you get presented with all the events which have occurred and can decide how to react to them. Every time an event happens you get treated to a new diorama.
I was fortunate enough to get to develop all of these dioramas, which ended up being close to 200 in total!
These dioramas came from large landscapes I built. Jake Hollands then hand picked the best individual compositions and provided feedback for any areas to polish.
Art direction was by Jake Hollands, shaders & technical art by @bobacupcake, and initial concepts by Owen D. Pomery
Working in this art style with the aim of making it run on low end apple devices was a huge challenge but we managed to achieve it!
I also rigged all the characters for @Jaiydanimate to animate.
Read more about the team in this lovely twitter thread here.
Watch the trailer here.
Find the game here.
Rallyallyally is the brainchild of Joe Bain. Created as a small game for the Meditations project it eventually went on to get funding from UK Games Fund.
Within the confines of a limited budget Joe brought me onboard to work on the art and to flesh out a demo, working towards the goal of sourcing more funding in order to finish the game.
We managed to complete a playable android version of the game with a build your own race track battle royal and a large map consisting of a dozen biomes and customisable cars.
Rallyallyally is out now on Steam
UI by Searra Dodds, additional art & level design by Connor Aitken, and audio by Damion Sheppard
Before was created by Bill Lowe. Designed as a stone age survival meets RTS game. You control a tribe of humans and had to build villages and invent new technology whilst surviving in harsh landscapes, full of predators and challenging weather. After being discovered and bought by Facepunch Bill brought me on board to create the majority of the art assets and animations. Other artists involved were Petur Agust and Vincent Mayeur.
I really enjoyed working on this project and was able to develop my skills by learning Unity C# and implementing complicated art assets.
I setup the buildings to visually build using blender scripts to assign vertex colours to individual components (e.g. stones and twigs), before merging into one mesh and using a shader to animate them appearing as they constructed.
I implemented a pipeline to reuse animation controllers between all the animals and stop foot sliding.
Additionally, I created a new set of custom trees complete with vertex colours and new shaders to plug into the unity weather system.
Unfortunately, for various reasons Before remains uncompleted.
My role has been to develop, create and build all of the art & animation aspects.
We are still ambitiously working to complete this game in 2024.
For more information check out an old WIP trailer, our webpage, or our twitter
