I love VR- I think if you ever have used the Quest you’ll understand how amazing it is to be fully immersed in a world you’ve created. Working with Meta and BigBoxVR has been an amazing adventure.
At BigBoxVR, my primary role is Art Outsourcing Manager. I produce and direct character concepts, gun concepts, 3D character production, 3D gun production, and marking visuals. Shortly after I joined, the studio shifted resources and I became responsible for full stack content development for Population:One. This included content brainstorming and scheduling through final 3D delivery.
Here you’ll see some examples of characters and guns I managed / directed from art brief through game implementation.
Partners include Volta and Lakshya Digital
Marketing Art by Ron Dodge
Jan 2019 I had the amazing opportunity to help pitch Drew and Jonathan Scott a game based on their series of wildly successful home renovation shows. Flying out to meet them at their Las Vegas home alongside Storm8’s current president, CCO, and CSO was initially intimidating, but the brothers were incredibly warm and we were able to secure a partnership (and some selfies).
We moved forward on developing Property Brothers Home Design quickly; I acted as Art Director and creative liaison to Scott Brothers Global in ensuring the product met their high standards and accurately reflected their brand. We launched in June 2019 and saw immediate success.
After the launch I flew out solo to Toronto where the Property Brothers were filming their latest show. Once there I joined them on-site to film additional marketing material for Storm8. It was such an amazing experience working with them (they’re so talented!) and their wonderful crew.
3 and half years later, Property Brothers Home Design continues to be Storm8’s most successful product.
Some Notes:
Though I’ve been the AD on this project for the past 3 years, I’ve also had the opportunity to design nearly 100 rooms for the game. (The concepts shown on this page are my own)
Character designs were established by Miles Dulay and Nigel Li.
The rooms are built in Maya, implemented in Unity, and lit by our proprietary BRDF shader refined by tech artists, Jonathan Glabas, and Paul Yula.
All environment concepts are designed internally by full time artists, and freelance interior designers.
We’ve released over 270 rooms as of Jan 2022, and continue to release 10 rooms per month on-going.
When I joined Jam City’s Lifestyle Division, their HGTV game had been in production for almost 2 years. I was responsible for pushing both their visuals and their content design to the next level, worthy of the HGTV brand very quickly prior to their soft launch.
Similar to other interior design games, most of the gameplay revolved around choosing materials, furniture and decor for rooms while managing inventory, costs, and design ratings.
The challenge in developing design-sim games is really understanding both the audience and the source material. When I first joined, the rooms felt like a game environment; all the elements were there but they weren’t composed or lit how a lifestyle photographer would capture a space. Same issue with lighting; often rooms were lit from artificial overhead lighting and not natural lighting. Providing direction on how to transform these rooms into spaces that a player could see in an interior design magazine or Pinterest was the first and most powerful change I implemented.
Secondly, production was halting and poorly organized. Majority of the content was being produced by external outsourcing partners, but most of the team had no experience with managing external vendors. Upon arriving I found excessively long turnaround times due to weak or non-existent feedback, late-stage director pivots, and very concerned and very unpaid vendors. Quickly, I was able to audit all outstanding content, cancel low quality content in iteration hell, get our vendors paid, and move forward on a documented 8 week content development schedule.
While the game was sadly destined for cancelation due to Jam City’s company pivot, I’m deeply proud of the direction and leadership I was able to lend to the project in my time there. In the months prior to the dissolution of the lifestyle division I was promoted to Head of Content and was excited to show the world our beautiful game.
I joined IXL as they began to ramp up production on their Math reboot project, which involved redesigning their PK Math curriculum and updating their visual art direction. The major part of my role was to facilitate conversation between the individual art coordinators, freelance artists, curriculum designers, and stakeholders.
By creating a clear pipeline, with check-in points for stakeholder buy in, we were able to reduce a huge amount of destabilization that had happened previously in the process via late stage iteration.
By speaking with the team and listening, we were able to ID the major pain points of production. We were able then, as a team, to create an effective process that fostered collaboration, allowing us to focus on our shared goal: helping kids learn!
