2023 – 2025 (Technical Artist)

News Page

This game is a Unity project I worked from its initial prototype, into live ops. It ended up winning ‘Excellence in Mobile’ in the 2024 AGDAs.

I worked on this project as the sole Technical Artist, and I ended up initially making a playable prototype of the game to validate the artistic direction. This meant I had to work closely with our 2D art team, animators, rigger and engineers to make sure everything could be accomplished efficiently and effectively on mobile devices.

I was in charge of testing the viability of an isometric game, and alongside the engineers we developed a deferred pipeline to manage sorting of 2D sprites in a 3D environment. This also allowed us to get basic shadows, lighting (day/night cycle) and area-of-effect block outs in the project.

We ended up using Unity’s Entity Component System for this game, which added a lot of overhead on the artists and designers on the project, so I sank a lot of time into making sure they could work speedily in iterating their work.

I worked closely with the animation and rigging department in being the in-engine representative, alongside another technical artist in developing a 2D rigging and animation tool set that allowed the animators to animate in Maya and have the sprites, shadow and held items behave identical in Maya as in Unity.

Aside from this Technical Art work, I also was the only FX Artist working in the project, so I had to develop tooling to manage sorting of particle effects as well as helping develop our FX direction for the project. Most of the FX were bespoke for this project and required me to make them from scratch or kit bash them from what was available to save time. As our art direction was cartoony and flat designs with outlines, I pushed our FX into much simpler shapes and, where possible for hero assets, worked closely with artists in developing flipbooks with outlines to match the rest of the game assets.

Some of the FX assets I created include the weather, status effects (shader and particles) and some post-processing effects like the darkness when the player moves away from light sources.

As of 2025, this project was removed off Netflix as they pivoted away from their ‘Netflix Games’ titles.