In this assignment, making a cv, cover email and showreel, I was not very confident in what to do at the beginning, the class we had on it giving tips on writing these bodies of work or composing a showreel were very helpful and a key point of reference going forward.

When I really started my researching I had maybe a few weeks before this deadline, and with the sudden necessary focus on the games design work throughout the module, I neglected this assignment for the most part at the start. I mean, I couldn’t even think of, let alone find a suitable job listing to use as reference for my written materials. Where I finally found a job posting was for OUTSIDER GAMES, as a role as a 3D background modeller, which I don’t think is an active unfilled job as of now, as the applications link gave me back a 404 message.

Researching this job posting I was mainly looking at, of course, a job that the role fits the work I have been developing most, which I can support in my showreel and CV, letting the pieces of work inform each other as best as possible, but I was also looking for specific details which matched what I have been doing most. This would be things like specific software, personal skills and skills around my level of quality of work. I think that this job role in OUTSIDER GAMES reasonably fits most of this criteria, or at least enough where the rest of the criteria can be negotiated around.

Some other bits of research which contributed a lot to my end products was looking into an indie games company, Salt Stone Studios, particularly the porfolio of the art director for their game, the pale beyond, Jess Campbell (found here: https://jessanight.com/bellular-studios-the-pale-beyond/ ). This portfolio not only being filled with engaging and interesting behind the scenes work, also informed me on what is and isn’t an important or valuable piece of work to show in your portfolio or showreel. All of the work shown in this portfolio serves to explain the work ethic, development and important changes/ decisions which fed into the final product. I aimed to achieve a similar goal in my showreel mainly.

Once I had this job in mind, the first bit of work I decided to tackle was the showreel. Using Adobe Premiere Pro, I started gathering clips of my old and new work, 2D and 3D, to show a good range of work. I wasn’t sure about structuring the showreel so my next step was to research into other artist’s showreels, for both 2D and 3D and note down what I think would entice me the most in them, as an employer, what was not impressive, which parts went on for too long and vice versa. I basically made a checklist from watching numerous showreels from a range of origins online to deduce the do’s and don’t in my own opinion. I know that maybe an employer would have different opinions or things in mind that I just wouldn’t, but I think I did a good example of not just copying and working off of previous examples of work, but also tried to steer away from parts I personally thought were not effective.

Furthermore, once I had a general structure of how my clips of work would be laid out, I did some more thinking about details like music, intro/outro and supporting details for the work in text throughout my showreel. I again found some examples of 2D showreels which incorporated these kind of details, writing down on the showreel information about the project a clip derived from, like the date, project title, what you contributed to the work, etc.

What I enjoyed about these example Showreels, especially the second one, was the information they gave for each clip, the overall presentation inlcuding the intro and outro parts were eye catching and effective. Furthermore, I enjoyed the mash and mixup of short and long clips to keep the pacing intruiging and to not bore the viewer, I feel like the clips and overall video in the second example was just long enough.

It also never really felt like the artist was ‘padding’ out their showreel with meaningless artworks, including still images or artwork for too long which don’t provide much just feel like the artist padding out the showreel to meet the lenght without the quality needed, so I would also try and steer clear of that problem as well.

Later I would add my most recent work with the games design work into my presentation as well, creating a scene with my props, 2D animations etc but did not linger too long on it, once I had everything in that I felt I needed I spent a few hours editing it together, with cuts, fading between some shots, drew some simple illustrations for both a profile image to build a rapport with the viewer, detials like a simple illustration of yourself build a rapport and remind the viewer that there is an artist behind the work and it is not just some random conjunction of assorted animations, it is in fact years of effort by one person, written details like titles of projects, dates, etc also add to this by showing the viewer each of these projects had a lot of thought put into them and overall adds emotional quality to the work.

Furthermore reinforcing this emotional rapport to engage the viewer and potential employers is the music choice, I was well aware that it would be hard to find a royalty free track I could use in the background of my showreel, but with some help and advice about different channels which make royalty free lofi music I found one that fit well into my showreel.

Around here I was feeling comfortable with my showreel, so I now stepped back and worked on my CV, taking the examples posted on blackboard as my main point of reference for what does and doesn’t work and generally what points you want to cover in a CV, cross referencing those notes with my other research into job roles like the 3D background modeller at OUTSIDER GAMES.

Generally I found that basic information that worked to add more to your cover letter/ email and your showreel worked best, details like a brief about me, details of education, personal skills, proficiencies with certain software and what kind of work you specialise in are all the most important parts to a CV to me. I tried to stay as close to my showreel’s presentation, with a similar type of font, also reusing my profile illustration and hand drawn illustrayourself.my name to again reinforce the overall rapport and link between these works to let them build upon each other. Furthermore, I stuck to a theming of desaturated soft blues with small hints of orange to pop to elevate the design from simply just black and white text.

Again I tried as best I could to utilise the research I committed to in all three parts of my work where I could, but of course the section where it was most applicable was the cover email, despite it being the shortest by far. This piece was just as important as it would be the first introduction and set up everything you would follow up with in your CV and showreel/ portfolio. I found that every sentence in the end had to add something, there was no room for filler or padding, so I tried as best to keep my cover email straightforward and concise, touching on as many points that the employer outlined in the job advertisement to appeal to them and get across that I am a fitting candidate and to convince them to take a good look at my further works like CV and showreel, where I could then properly build upon a rapport between all the work and hopefully convince the employers, showing them the absolute best of the work I have produced and what I believe I could bring to the table if considered. I noticed that of course a lot of these produced pieces for this assignment ended up with a lot of pandering to the employer, to put it bluntly, but I feel like that is just a normal and important feature of selling yourself to an employer as a hard worker fit for their job role.

To conclude on my findings with this assignment, I have found what is best effective in putting together a CV, cover email and showreel to effectively engage with, build a rapport with and convince the viewer/ employer that I am indeed a fitting candidate for the job. I found that a lot of small details in the composition, design, phrasing, where you put what clips in your showreel and more add up to either making or breaking the intended image you want to push towards the employer about yourself.

To say this project has been a rocky journey would be an understatement, personally, I was warned to not take up the games design option for this module, but I was just too interested in making game art, like assets, characters and much more. It is just so satisfying getting to not only work to make a playable final product, but to get to then have the satisfaction of playing it yourself. I don’t regret going down the route of games, but I would surely warn my past self. I enjoy this module conceptually, but most of it in practice came with so many stumbles and obstacles.

Pre-Production

Going back to a much more optimistic period in this module, when our groups were picked out and we got our first class to talk as a full group and come up with initial ideas, I had already started off with going around our group and calling for a vote on which of the list of styles we were given as examples were the most popular in our group. We landed on a comic inspired fantasy style, similar to titles like World of Warcraft or League of Legends, two of the more well known users of this kind of style. From my couple weeks of research from the start of this module I studied the style, how aspects of it had a huge resurgence in 3D/2.5D animation in recent years, this ‘painted on’ look on 3D models can be found from many different shows, again one of the more popular examples being from League of Legend’s ‘Arcane’.

At first we thought of a game where you control two characters in a rouge-like strategy-fighting game, but we were deterred from this by the games teachers. After one or two more failed ideas we landed on one that stuck. Our game idea was a local co-op puzzling game where two players control two vastly different characters who interact with each other and their surroundings in massively different ways, which would be used to get through puzzles using thoughtful teamwork. It would have a story about two adventurers learning to work and depend on each other despite their differences. Since the first presentation of the module loomed close, our three animation students, including myself, immediately started concept art for our main characters, focusing heavily on exaggerated shape language, deriving from iconic fantasy races to make our characters as visually opposing as possible. After toying with a few variations, we landed on a big, tough, headstrong Orc woman and a meek, smart Gnome man.

I researched heavily into games in similar genres of either gameplay or art style to our concept. A couple notable examples are the indie game tax force, Fireboy and Watergirl, Hades, Portal 2 co-op. These are a vast spread of games but we were able to pull something from each. The puzzle style and level design of Fireboy and Watergirl meets Portal 2 co-op, with a more modern take on a classic comic inspired fantasy style like World of Warcraft, often dipping more into Hades and a little bit into Tax force for its exaggerated and comic inspired art style.

At this point in our work, most of the narrative and character focussed material in conceptualising our game came from the animation students, even early on I would definitely say 80% or more of the game’s identity came from our work, despite one game student being sure that he was ‘the narrative guy’. This, I would say was our first issue as a group. There seemed to be lots of miscommunicating of the narrative in the beginning, particularly with one person who would make drastic changes to the story without coming to the group first. After a few days of confusion in our group chat, we had to arrange a short time to meet in person during our next class to go over the narrative and make it concrete with the games student dealing with narrative solely.

After this short setback, we shifted focus to finalising the concept art and developing an art guide, so we split our three characters between us and some other aspects of art direction, I particularly focused on our Orc character, modelling her closely after World of Warcraft, Hades‘s character models and Warhammer minis, I also went deeper into developing a style for our dragon boss enemy, the level design art direction, colour themes, and a few more aspects. I was very happy with the outcome of our art guide and enjoyed hearing feedback when we got to present, even if we had to rush through most of our slides.

Production

Now that we were sure what we needed to do for this project at this stage, Becca, Amy and I could easily split up the work load based on each of our strong suits or where they were more comfortable. I was happy working on any aspect so I mainly got started on Modelling the two main characters to start with so I could hand them off to Becca to sculpt and texture and to Amy to animate once I rigged them. This plan did work out, however it ended up taking a lot longer than expected, so we would ultimately end up scaling back on the third character and cutting out things like dialogue art. We found it best to make a detailed plan, figure out what was most important, do that, then be able to spend less time or cut out less important features.

Furthermore, I would say that amongst our group we had a good idea of how to organise our work, communicating and keeping up to date with each other. Early on we made a google drive to share files,  a group chat to share ideas and research, documents to keep track of who is doing what props, (as pictured below) and much more.

Once I was nearing completion on rigging the second character, I decided to shift my focus to working on the props, as our level design person was asking a lot about getting into those. I felt I would have enough time waiting for the other two animation teammates to make the most out of my first rigged model that I could fill in for some unfinished props. I took a look at some of the unfinished blender files where props had been started and decided to just start from scratch, again looking at Fantasy MMOs as inspiration for textures and exaggerated décor like crates, barrels, torches, etc. I put optimisation absolutely first, listening to our level designer’s advice to stick around the 2,000 triangles range for most props. For a few weeks I chipped away at the ever growing props list, it started slow but quickly picked up speed as I found easier and easier ways to streamline my process of modelling, unwrapping, texturing and importing into a blank unreal file for testing.

Here are my two character models complete but not textured, all of my culminating work on props in both blender and a blank unreal file.

I found features in substance I had not encountered before and went much more in-depth with these props on how far I could push the customisation of my texture maps, making hand drawn textures, shading and drawn-on ambient occlusion to ultimately give my props as much of a hand painted look as possible. I would say out of all of the projects in this course, I had learnt the most interesting techniques at accomplishing this style here, entirely out of my own over-ambition to stay as true to the style as possible and see this vision of the game I had ring true.

Something I attempted with one prop, was to try and animate it, but with just how long it took to troubleshoot importing it into unreal, I just left this attempt only on one prop and decided to look at other ways I could fit more animation and life into the assets I was working on for our game. I had a try and animating two short looping fire animations to be included in props like the torch, lantern, candle, fire trap to give a bit more life and hopefully make the levels ultimately more visually appealing.

Here is my one animated prop and both fire sequences.

I enjoyed not being stuck down to one specific role for too long and being able to work in a group to cover each others weaknesses.

Issues nearing productions end

At this point in the project I was very comfortable with my own quality and quantity of work, however I was aware it was likely that we would need to scale back more than expected, because of a lack of progress, but also because one game student’s all but official departure, who by this point had not spoken to us in weeks. Unfortunately, at this point, somewhere around a week before we were going to present our games to industry professionals, at a point in a class where I was not even there, those in my group who had met up that day were, at least from what I know were either convinced or pressured into changing our game’s genre.

Despite this setback, we continued to work, changing our plans for the game to fit the work we had already started, so cut out unfinished assets, characters, features, etc. It was a shame to see the original vision get crushed in a single day from a single person’s whims and now so much work was up in the air whether it was even going to be used or thrown away. It took a lot of reorganising to get back on our feet, but I would personally say that from our finished game I am happy with how well we turned it around from being a failure. I would have loved to see where the game could have gone in a more natural development and with more polish, but I am happy to have gotten the experience of both the terrible lows and highs of developing art for games, coming from pre to post production, from a range of jobs, styles and problems it sure was rough, but a necessary experience to be ready for real industry scenarios, where these communication skills, research and development and ultimately, the teamwork is most important.

I could go on and on about the abundance of challenges our group went through and persisted through and what I have learnt about it, but what I think stands out to me as the most important is the understanding that with how easily something or someone can pose a problem to your product, whether it is game or otherwise, whether you must follow their lead or not, what I have learnt from this situation is the ability to trust, rely on and be reliable to your group is key to succeeding in a group setting, in a few month long project doomed to fail, or in the big scary industry, the fact that you can rely on your fellow artist and work around each other to overcome these issues is exceedingly important to ‘being successful’ in a group work setting.

Finishing up production

Where I felt the most comfortable with my level of work was when I had over the course of a few weeks, blasted through plenty of props and assets for the level design. This did leave me with a bit to juggle, especially having to pivot back to working on the main characters to allow my other animation teammates to continue their parts. I feel like an important skill strengthened throughout the project is adaptability, being able to switch between different jobs and being able to guide and help your teammates. Recently, when we were nearing the period where we really wanted to be done with production and focus on post-production, like importing the assets, animations and characters into unreal engine to swap out temporary assets for the real ones, it kept feeling like that stage was so far away, so, with no more important props for me to focus on, I helped out unwrapping one character model and completing two action animations for them, to help my teammates get through the last part of the work as soon as possible.

Here are two videos showcasing both these animations and my rigs I used to do them.

How does the art work look in-game?

Here are two videos recorded by our level designer, Vilius and then Josephi, respectively.

To be entirely honest, I have a lot of problems with the overall look of the game at this point.

I am disappointed by how little of our, mainly my own work in props, were used, most of the artwork, assets, etc consist of things downloaded from FAB or other online stores. Some of the assets I did make are either underused, not used at all, are used weirdly and many more problems. During production, multiple times the level designer kept persuading us to not worry about making textures for the brick backgrounds, even though Amy had already started on early versions of them, seen in the first menu of the game still, however the rest of the game uses these horribly unfitting brick textures which don’t mesh with the colour of stone bricks used in my own props, everything here doesn’t mesh together, the dungeon’s layout is disjointed, confusing and uses a lot of randomly places diagonal geometry not even spoken about before and which directly goes against any art direction developed. I can safely say that at any given moment in these videos the parts that were made from our own work would add up to maybe 10- 25% of what is shown on screen at any point, and that is not for a lack of content, it is just that the way the levels are designed was so poorly communicated that most of it just is not even our own work, most of my own work was discarded because of the random genre change near the end and how many changes happened to the game which rendered so many assets useless, not even mentioning the entire levels, numerous props and assets I didn’t even know were going to be a thing in the game.

Reflection

Moving on from my issues with the final product, I would like to bullet point my overall takeaways and reflecting on how I went about this work.

What would I say I have done well and what could I work on more?

I think my communication and adaptability were needed for this project a lot, being able to work around and alongside teammates and keep up to date with each other was vital. I believe that how well we explained or defended our concepts or to try and convince the level designer to stick closer to the art guide or get them to communicate with us more would be better. Other than that it felt like a lot of the failings of the project were outside of our own control. I would also like to work on how quickly I get stuck into the work, to take more pressure off myself when it gets closer to the deadline.

At what stage was I at my strongest/ most confident with the work?

I felt most comfortable when I was repeatedly making props, after the first 5 with trial and error, I got the loop of making my props down and could repeat it over and over, getting better each time and learning a lot about the software I was using, looking into researching about substance painter and unreal engine online as well.

Where could I have put more time?

other than demanding for more communication from the level designer maybe, I could have worked closer with Becca to get the main models presentable faster rather than props and assets that were underused or thrown out anyways.

Conclusion

To conclude, as I have dragged this blog on a lot now, I am happy with how the work went on the side of the animators, how our research, development, art guide, communicating was all smooth, but I wish following up into development that the art direction could have been kept alive more despite the many outside problems with working with the games design students and teachers, from one ‘narrative guy’ leaving us without a word, the games design teachers forcing changes which caused more problems than fixes and just not having much say in how the game went, I still appreciate the experience and am glad that throughout all the struggle, the artists stuck together, worked together well and were all on the same page.