BombBuddies
Roles: Art Director, Tech Artist, 3D Generalist
40 People | 7 Months
Bomb Buddies is a 2-player cooperative AR mobile party game, where the player must win a series of fast-paced microgames to prevent a hacker from dropping a major “bomb” and destroying their reputation.
As Art Director, I helped the Director and UI/UX Lead develop the visual style for the game, tailoring it for mobile devices, created a pipeline for art asset creation from ideation to implementation, and managed a team of 7 artists.
As a Tech Artist, I created and implemented a variety of UI assets, materials, and shaders for the 3D/AR mini-games including an infinite scrolling background, interactive timer, halftone burning fuse, and a 2D animation state manager.
This project was developed as part of the Advanced Game Project capstone at the USC Interactive Media and Game Design program and is available now on the iOS App store!
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bomb-buddies-usc-games/id6443524416
Experience as an Art Producer
As a technical artist, my duties included 3D Modeling, Creating materials and shaders with Shadergraph, and creating systems that minimized the work needed to import and implement assets into the game. I would also be the first responder when bugs or unexpected graphical artifacts appeared.
As Art producer, I lead a team of 7 artists, specializing in 2D, 3D, and UI design to create and implement art assets each sprint. I also advised the director on utilizing Unity’s systems to execute her vision and established the art pipeline and file directory structure for the game.
We operated in a scrum framework where I facilitated Tri-weekly art team stand-ups and ultimately successfully implemented 5-10 refined assets per sprint, in pace to meet our project milestones and faculty reviews. By the end of production, the art team had completed 330 out of 338 assigned tasks, a completion rate of 97%!
Our Art Pipeline
We followed this process to create all of our art assets. Concepting was critical to making sure we didn't spend too much time on assets that would eventually be changed by the design, narrative or programming teams. Unfortunately, some mini-games would get scrapped, so we would try to balance the amount of time placeholder art was used before we needed finals for faculty reviews. Implementation would generally fall to me or the lead programmer.
Tools
Our primary project management tool was Codecks, which had its drawbacks and benefits. The program has tasks on "cards" which are assigned to a user's "hand" by a steward.
It was helpful for the leads and director to see what the whole team was working on from a top-down perspective, but onboarding artists, especially those from outside our email domain was a hassle and the user experience was rather overwhelming. Personally, I would've preferred to use Excel.
