Bubble Safari

Back while I was working at Zynga I had the opportunity to help out with a couple of cinematics for the game Bubble Safari (Playable on Facebook).  Over the course of a few weeks I had modeled and textured various props including the plane you'll see below and several smaller props (gas tanks, rope, crates, etc.). It was nice change of pace at the time and a good way to round out my time at Zynga.

Check out Bubble Safari here (it's quite addicting if you havent played it yet):  http://company.zynga.com/games/bubble-safari

Retro/Grade

I'm going to get a little crazy here and do two posts in one day... and i'm going to continue the trend of posting stuff I worked on a while ago.  Last week (or the week before) saw the release of a game I worked on maybe two and a half years ago... Retro/Grade for PSN!  I made some art for the game over the span of a few months (enemy ships and misc props) and its great to see it out now.  Check it out if you have a Playstation!

Universal Monsters

A little back-story for this post... A while back, around December 2010, myself and most of my coworkers got acquired from Planet Moon Studios after the project we were working on went sour (read more about that here).  It was definitely some rough times, but I was fortunate to be placed on the small original team for a game called Universal Monsters Online (What a great IP, Dracula, Frankenstein, Etc!).  Well the team just went to open beta recently you should check out the beta here - its super fun and they did a great job on it.  Back when I was helping with the game I got to do some early prototyping, character and environment art for the project, working with the Unity game engine.  The game and art style has changed quite a bit from what it originally was but I figured it would be cool to toss up some of the early work.  And a big shout out to Ed Pereira who made me some great shaders to use, including the lava one a few pics down - you should see it in motion!

Aliens are fun...

Just wanted to post this up, a quick sculpt (hour and a half) from the other week.  Messing with dynamesh and the different brushes. Fun.

Hidden Chronicles

Back in January, Zynga launched a game called Hidden Chronicles (http://apps.facebook.com/hidden-chronicles).  This was my first project with Zynga and really gave me a good look into the fast paced production of making games for Facebook. I was fortunate to be on the project for most of its development and worked on it almost till launch (about 5 months, crazy quick dev cycle).  Even though the development was so quick, we still managed to pivot on the art and design successfully several times.

The really interesting part of my time on the Hidden Chronicles team was how diverse my tasks were.  I was originally hired to help create 3d models for our ISO world (which I got to do for a month or two), but due to there only being one artist working on the UI, the 3d modeling I was doing quickly changed to assisting with the UI push (mostly creating our library of icons).  Getting to work on a few different area in the art team gave me a really got a good look at many parts of the art pipeline. Like I mentioned before, we pivoted on art style a couple times, you'll notice some of the various styles that were tried out below.  Ultimately the team settled on a more texture rich, faux-realistic approach to the icon work as compared to some of the more traditional Zynga/Cityville style of art.  Overall, it came out pretty nice, though, there are still remnants of some of the earlier styles that were created still left over in the game that I wish could have been changed.  I finally took some time this weekend and threw together some of the assets that I worked on for the game, check it out below.

So what am I up to now?  Well, after Hidden Chronicles I moved onto the Zynga San Diego team - It's been a blast! I'm currently working on supporting Cafe World with new features and some other "new things" that I can't talk about, you know how it goes...

Wedding Stuff!

Oh man - It has been a crazy start to this year already (Thus why my last post was back in November).  In under 100 days I'm getting married, so I figured I would show and talk about some of the art pieces Stephanie and I have been putting together for the wedding.  After doing a ton of talking and researching we decided we wanted to go with a more playful / fun style for most of our collateral, we are getting married on a cruise after all.  The save the date and website really speak to this, it's way casual, I am really pleased with how it came out.  A buddy of ours helped code it all up and gave it some awesome personality - the bubbles float to the top, fish swim across the page, rsvp online (except firefox :/) and the navigation is pretty slick.

A couple months after putting out the website and save the date it was time for the invites... which I was really procrastinating on.  I knew I wanted to class them up a little but also retain the fun / casual feel of the website.  Finally, one afternoon Stephanie got me to sit down and we cranked out an initial design.  After some debate and a few trips to the Paper Source / Jo-Anns we settled on some colors and textures we liked.  Plus all the little embellishments we chose went a long way too - the custom embossed stamping, tags and twine really made it nice (gotta give Stephanie the credit on that).

Anyways, yea, weddings are a lot of work, I'm glad to be getting closer to the "big day" and we only have a few other things to make before then...

In other news I've switched studios within Zynga! And! The last game I was working on is now out (It's actually been out for a while now), Hidden Chronicles on Facebook, but, I'll cover more in another post sometime soon...