Technical Art

As a technical artist I am the bridge between art and development. I add the "Unity layer" to our projects, creating dynamic UI, bespoke shaders, custom animations, and interesting effects for our games. I optimize all graphics and refine our implementation pipelines, as well as assist in the design, creation, and implementation of new features.

Below are some video examples of recent technical art implementations across the Empire Games portfolio.

• Client: Empire Games
• Date: 2022-Present
• Category: Technical Art, Game Design

Bdcraft Resource Packs

As an artist for BDcraft, I spend a majority of my time creating assets for Minecraft resource packs. I designed and created almost all the items and many of the entities for GrungeBDcraft, as well as updates to our other packs, PureBDcraft and VanillaBDcraft.

I am also working on some other projects, doing concept art, texturing, and even a little bit of coding and UI (unfortunately I can't share images of those yet - sorry!).

• Client: BDcraft SAS
• Date: June 2020
• Category: Character Design, Texturing, Illustration

Critter Cards

Critter Cards is an augmented reality (AR) virtual pets game that I am creating. The game's current iteration served as my thesis project for my MA. I plan to fully realize this game at a later date.

Critter Cards combines the portability of older virtual pet designs (such as Tamagotchi) with meaningful breeding and collecting mechanics. I wanted Critter Cards to embody all the positive traits of pet ownership and virtual pet video games, without the stressors associated. As part of my MA research, I isolated features that can cause stress and anxiety in users in order to either eliminate or lessen those mechanics. I also presented the "science of cute" and what objective design elements make a character cute, and therefore help increase our attachment to that character. I also researched the concepts of scarcity, ownership, and the pathos behind collecting. And finally, I came to the conclusion that by having a virtual pet exist in the physical play space through AR, players might feel an even deeper connection to their virtual pet.

In Critter Cards you can design basic Critters (give it a try yourself by clicking the link at the end of this post!) and breed them to create a unique hybrid Critter that has the chance of inheriting rare attributes. In its current iteration, as seen in the video below, a child Critter has an equal chance to inherit any of its binary attributes, such as eyes, horns, and markings. A child's ear shape is a 50% blend between each of its parents ears, and its colors are a random blend of its parents' colors. The virtual elements of the game are demonstrated in the following video.

To demonstrate what AR features the game would include, I allowed for the player to choose which of their Critters they wanted to play with in the physical play space by allowing them to assign their Critters to 3 different AR marker cards. Then, the player could sample two different mini-games. The first is a Simon Says style mini-game, where the player must remember the sequence of directions the Critter tells them and repeat it each turn. The second mini-game is a color matching game, where the Critter asks for a specific color and the player provides it with real-life object of that color in order to satisfy its needs.

I created every aspect of this game apart from the music, which was composed by the talented Jamie Day. This game was coded in C# and created in Unity using the Vuforia AR Engine. Its save system is currently a basic JSON system I designed, and all the assets were drawn on my iPad Pro with Apple Pencil.

If you want to design your own Critter, be sure to click the itch.io link below! And, if you're feeling extra inspired, please send me a screenshot of your creation--I'd love to hear from you!

• Date: September 2019
• Category: Game Development, Character Design

Puppetmation

Puppetmation was designed to be an accessible animation platform. Simply put on a sock puppet, point it at a webcam, and users will be able to make fun digital puppet shows using an actual puppet as their tool.

I wanted this project to be as simple as possible, or at least seem that way. The puppet is just that--a sock puppet, made from felt, ping-pong balls, and a fuzzy sock. I followed a wonderful tutorial by Ana DIY Crafts to create Orangthany (the purple puppet) and Notyet (the blue prototype puppet).

In order to get the most accurate mouth shapes, I found a tutorial for custom-made capacitive sensors called zPatch. These sensors are made from scratch, and are therefore extremely customizable and quite sensitive. The creators made an Arduino library for the patches, so programming was straightforward. I simply mapped the values produced from the capacitive sensors to he height of the mouth.

The first iteration of this puppet used color tracking to track where the puppet was. A later iteration used an infrared LED, which was more effective, but requires a specially modified PlayStation Eye (or other specific camera) to make full use of. In the future I will use machine learning and create my own library of objects, like the eyebrows, that the camera will be able to track and is built into the application.

The following video was one I made for a course on my Masters degree, and shows Puppetmation in action.

• Date: May 2019
• Category: Physical Computing, Fabrication

Cerebria The Inside World

I was contracted to design over 80 characters for Mindclash Game's Cerebria: The Inside World. I rendered the illustrations in pencil, and they were finished in-house by the Mindclash team. Each character is meant to represent a different emotion and evolve into a stronger form of the emotion.

Pessimism and Narcissism

Affection and Adoration

Courage and Heroism

Confidence and Self Respect

Insecurity and Doubt

The following images are from the BoardGameGeek page for Cerebria.

• Client: Mindclash Games
• Date: December 2018
• Category: Character Design, Illustration

Monster Illustrations

When I first started my business, "I've Created a Monster!", I drew a monster illustration every day. Here's a sampling of some of my favorites.

• Date: December 2016
• Category: Character Design, Illustration

Traditional And Digital Art

I love drawing in any medium--here are some samples (descriptions below):

Done digitally in Procrate on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, this is my online persona, StickerMonster.

Created on my iPad Pro with Apple Pencil in Medibang Paint, this is the mascot I designed for Twitch streamer SleepingDogfish.

Using my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and Procrate, I made these character portraits for my current Dungeons and Dragons campaign that is streamed weekly on Twitch. Pictured are Sparky (me), a kobold tinkerer, and Nightshade Glimmer, a ravenfolk fixer.

Painted in fluid acrylic and watercolors, I created this scene with my character Gilly to be featured on a vertical banner for my old illustration business.

A glimpse into my painting process, top left is a pencil sketch, top right is inking, bottom left has base shadows in fluid acrylics, and bottom right is after finishing it with watercolors.

A character originally designed for my "I've Created a Monster" series, Biggs became a fan favorite, so I rendered him in different styles like this one--done in Medibang Paint on my iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. This design was later turned into a series of acrylic ornaments.

On the left is a shadowbox created from paper and painted in watercolor and fluid acrylic. On the right is a fake taxidermy head of Biggs (pictured above), made of paper with foam eyes and backplate.

Both drawn traditionally, the left is a charcoal and pastel rendering of a model from a figure drawing session. To the right is a hand and foot sketched in pencil from a different session.

• Client: Various
• Date: 2016-2019
• Category: Illustration, Fabrication, Character Design

Lightning Makes Babies

Lightning Makes Babies is the unreleased next game by Dragon Army, where I was put in charge of character design.

• Client: Dragon Army
• Date: July 2015
• Category: Character Design, Game Development, Illustration