Monday, April 16, 2012

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...