Game Projects
Project Ecotopia
Hatbusters
Project Unmute
Project Ecotopia
First-person Narrative game for PC built in Unity
Role: Character Technical Artist, Animator, and Art Director
IEEE Game SIG 2023 - Second Place Winner
Project Ecotopia explores ideas in sustainable community development. The player can explore a contained rooftop community garden, converse with characters, and complete tasks as part of a narrative that takes place over multiple distinct time periods.
Drawing heavy inspiration from Studio Ghibli as our visual target, I have created, rigged, and animated character assets according to a Unity production pipeline. I also wrote a rigging tool using Python for Maya as part of this game development pipeline intended for Unity.
Project Unmute
Interactive Experience in webGL
Role: Character Artist
Client: UPMC
I worked as the character artist and animator on this project - a virtual science museum designed to teach high school students about CRISPR technology in a fun and engaging format. Character conceptualization, sculpting, texturing, rigging, and animating - all these tasks were completed according to the Unity production pipeline.
Tabula Rasa
Character Customizer Dev Prototype built in Unreal 5.1
Role: Character Technical Artist
Client: Electronic Arts: Positive Play Group
I worked as the character technical artist and rigger on this project. Our goal was to design an approach to character customization not constrained by the gender binary, in a way that would preserve inclusivity even in different localizations. Our goal was to create a short prototype in Unreal for the developers at EA to use as a basis for improving character customizers using their own in-house game engine, Frostbite.
Hatbusters
Multiplayer game for Vive trackers and 3DRudder
Role: Character Artist
Featured at CMU ETC Fall Festival
Two players compete against each other in order to accumulate the largest number of hats.
I created the cover art, the instruction page and symbols, and also created the ghost character in the game.
We also themed and decorated a room based on Hatbusters in order to present it in a location-based entertainment format. We designed the room in such a way so that the audience waiting in the queue could also enjoy the gameplay while they awaited their turn. The whole game design of Hatbusters was designed to be experienced in this format - namely, it should be as engaging for a spectator as it was for the players.
Concept Art Gallery
Hatbusters
Hatbusters drew a lot of inspiration for its visual style from Fall Guys. The goal of this round was to create a game to be showcased at the fall festival - hence bright colours, simple mechanics, and appealing character and environment design were the elements we used to increase player engagement. We also embraced the weirdness of our concept - we wanted Hatbusters to be a game people would want to play over and over at festival, by encouraging them to compete against one another.
First iteration of our character "Boo" - inspired by Fall Guys
The emphasis was on creating a character that did not rely on legs to move around, hence we gravitated more towards a "ghost-like" appearance.
It was important for players to feel a connection to "Boo" and want to play as them. Hence, we tried to make Boo appear as "cute" as possible in order to appeal to players of all ages.
The cuteness attribute was retained in the final design for Boo. Boo needed arms but not legs; the arms would also allow players to tell with greater ease which way Boo was facing during gameplay.
This was the first pass at modelling Boo in Maya.
Boo was refined a little bit in this stage. I changed the position of the hands to face forward in order to help players easily tell which way Boo was facing on the game screen. We also playtested this design and overwhelmingly received the response that Boo was cute and appealed to a wide variety of people. This was exactly the response we had been looking for.
Part of the room decoration I did for Hatbusters at the ETC Fall Festival 2021, featuring Boo.
Themed entertainment design at the festival for Hatbusters.
Hatbusters being played at the festival - layout
CAT-astrophe
Single player game for Oculus Quest 2
Role: 2D Artist/ 3D Environment Artist
The introductory and exit scenes were created by me, as well as the visuals for the environment and the setting. We were given a time limit of 2 weeks to create this game from start to finish, and this was a great opportunity to work with people from different backgrounds towards a common goal.
Gallery
Concept Art and Cutscene Panels
My primary contribution to this game was as a 2D artist. I was heavily inspired by Hanna Barbera and Metro Goldwyn Mayer cartoons I had always enjoyed since my youth, and I used the signature visual language from those sources in order to visualise this game. The character herself is drawn from a mix of Looney Tunes as well as Sonic the Hedgehog. Exaggerating the eyes in any kind of character design makes the character endearing to the onlooker. For the purposes of our game, it was important that the player feel protective towards this character. This is in sharp contrast to the cat character. The triangular visual language noticeable everywhere on the cat clearly expresses its hostility towards the player and their objective in the game.
Game Development on Unity: Galaxy Shooter Game
A C# project
I want to understand all parts of the production pipeline when it comes to games. I also wanted to develop technical expertise in a creative capacity. This was the motivation behind me learning how to develop this game. I went with a simple concept and used artwork from Game Dev HQ, provided for the Udemy course "Ultimate Guide to Game Development with Unity 3D". However, I am proud to say every line of code in this project was written, tested, and debugged solely by me with occasional mentorship and advice from Game Dev HQ moderators.