This is the culmination of all the production work I completed whilst developing Riptide. I held two primary production roles as Co-Project Lead and Art Lead along with some minor production responsibilities as the teams Technical Artist.
Art Lead
Creation of the Art Style
The creation of the art style of Riptide was a combined effort between the artists during the first stage of the project. We settled on a style that we dubbed ‘Optimistic Realism’ which was heavily inspired by predictions of the future from the past. Some of our primary influences came from science magazines produced between the 1930s-50s. Most notably Popular Mechanics and Popular Science.
Art Direction
After the art style was determined, I created a 39 page Art Bible that would help guide fellow and future artists. As lead artist part of my responsibility was ensuring that art within the game remained cohesive and consistent. In order to accomplish this I led weekly artist meeting and provided consistent feedback and critique to my fellow artists.
Task Management
In an effort to keep the team aware of our tasks and progress, I created an asset list for artists to track their work throughout the semester. This was later expanded to include programmer and designer tasks. Our team also used Jira to manage each sprints goals and individual tasks.
Trailer
The trailer was a combined effort between our environment/cinematics artist, narrative designer, sound designer and myself. I directected and edited the final cut and worked with Unreal’s cinematics tools to create footage for the edit.
Technical Artist
Interdisciplinary Communication
One of my roles as a technical artist was being a point of connection across disciplines. Although my primary connection was between the programmers and artists, I also frequently interacted with designers and producers to ensure their goals were feasible, within technical scope, and could be completed on time.
Since I was aware of both the technical and artistic feasibility of planned/desired features, I often had to my foot down on things and be the one to say no. Which is frankly never the fun part of the job, but I take solace in knowing that it did save the teams programmers and artists from increasing their already oversized workload.
Tech Support
I often assisted fellow artists with technical implementations of their assets as well as helping them solve any bugs that arose during their work. I also somewhat doubled as “Art-Tech Support” for non-artists roles. This usually involved working with programmers and designers to make sure that features they were working on would be visually represented the way they were envisioning.
Co-Project Lead
Inter-team Communication
As our team size got bigger I worked with my fellow project Co-Lead and the discipline leads to create a framework for information and direction to be dispersed evenly. We organized twice a week in-person work sessions, weekly discipline meetings, and a weekly lead meeting. This system allowed us to communicate clearly across a team of 17 and ensure that everyone was clear on what each weeks goals were.
External Communication
Our team met and worked frequently with the other teams in our year to organize playtests, meetings, and updates. Part of our cohorts philosophy was to maintain clear and honest communication between the teams as well as providing support to each other when possible. Our team worked with another to present all our year’s games at the PAX East conference in Boston.
Weekly Presentation Updates
As part of our course the team had to give weekly updates and step defenses to faculty advisors. I created a presentation framework and slidedeck that allowed us to make efficient use of our time, alst while keeping the audience visually engaged.
Steam Page Creation & Marketing
Working with our years Games Business and Publishing students, I oversaw the creation of our game’s Steam page along with assisting in our marketing efforts. I created a brand style guide so that visual marketing work could be more easily delegated.
