Birdteeth is casual, cozy video game I made with L3ad Planet.I was the art director and technical artist, creating nearly every visual aspect seen in gameplay. I provided notes and directions while working with guest artist Amy Chen when concepting the Shrikebeaked Poko, ensuring the design fits the gameplay world and visual style. The remaining birds were concepted and designed myself.I created the rig, animations, and shaders of all the 3D elements, working heavily with Maya, Substance Painter, and incorporating everything into Unity Engine. The visuals were finalized using Unity's shader graph. Additionally, I created all of the 2D assets, including the UI assets, compendium illustrations, and the start screen illustration.

• Coming Soon

A 30 minute video game I made with L3ad Planet and Ann-Marie Henderson.I was the concept artist and character artist, establishing the visual style and working closely with the environment artist to ensure a cohesive and unified aesthetic. I created the bones and extra items of each level, as well as the characters of the game using Maya and Substance Painter. Additionally, I created the majority of the UI assets, including buttons, textboxes, and the start and end screen illustrations. The game was made using Unity Engine.

• Play Game

A high score game I made with L3ad Planet and KiroRonin. I made all the art, designs, and assets. I also helped in coming up with the game design and the concept and difficulty of the game.
The game was made in 30 hours for the Global Game Jam using Unity Engine.

• Play Game

A short video game I made with L3ad Planet.
I was in charge establishing the visual style and general art direction. I created the assets, including the UI and sprites. Additionally, I created all the 3D models and rigging, with Maya and Substance Painter. The game was made using Unity Engine.

• Play Game

A competitive two player game I made with L3ad Planet.
I was in charge establishing the visual style and general art direction. I created all the assets, including the UI and sprites, and all the animations. The game was made using Unity Engine.

• Play Game

A quick, story driven top-down RPG I made for Guide and Seek, an online art community.
I created several assets including the animations, the tilesets, the sprites, and the ending screen. The UI, cover, and prop assets were done by Amy Chen. The game was made using Unity Engine.

• Play Game

A short narrative experience. I created all the assets and the code. The game was made using Unity Engine.

• Play Game

A high score game made entirely by me, aside from the sound. I created all the art assets and the code. The game was made using Unity Engine.

• Play Game

I began with the idea of a broken bridge, wanting to create both a main path and a perceived path, where the player would see the bridge that leads directly to the ruins in the distance and wish to cross the bridge to their destination, but the interruption forces them to find the cliffside ledges as an alternate route. The player, an explorer, wishes to recover the civilization that has been long lost and disconnected from the rest of the world. The sword remains from the forgotten battle that destroyed the city and cut off any history that may have survived from it, leaving it just beyond reach.I was also very attached to the idea of a single, bright light in the background. The light would not only be a secondary focus point to indicate to the player where to go, and also serve as a narrative device, hinting that one building still remained occupied, despite the abandonment of the rest.

After greyboxing in Maya, I played around in Unity to test alternate lighting and colors. I decided to merge the elements I liked from all three. The colors from the top left, which were the original colors and lights that I had in the earlier concept art. I incorporated the shadow from the bottom image to add some more drama and contrast. Finally, the top right image was originally not used at all, but several iterations led to the sword being too hidden in the dark, so I added a much less intense spot light from above, which gave the sword both a more emphasized rim light, and made its details more visible.

The final product contained assets modeled in Maya, sculpted in ZBrush, and textured in Substance Painter. Effects were added and everything was put together, lit, and color graded in Unity.The platforming cliff rocks were made by Luchaaa as part of an asset swap project, where each student had to create an asset for another classmate to experiment with different stylizations.

I created several variations of the bookshelves, books, candles, and textures, to scatter and populate the area, ensuring that, while the environment is inherently repetitive, the player would not feel bored.

After entering the interior, the player will find themselves in an abandoned library layered with bookshelves. The bottom of the long, spiral staircase will lead players directly facing the central book, the final focus and destination. The book is open to the page that provides some insight on the history of the world and the giant who wielded the sword that destroyed the civilization explored earlier. This project was intended to practice different types of lighting, shadow, and light and reflection probes within an interior space.

While I was playing around with the thumbnails, I came up with various ideas using opposites, such as a comparison between deep sea divers and astronauts, the contrast of medieval style armor in a futuristic cyber city, heat and cold, a greenhouse of ocean plants, and crows praying to scarecrows. The final idea I landed on was a play on the term “murder of crows”, where crows would look down at the corpse below, and the trees would be littered with various murder weapons, as if the crows commited the crime then robbed the victim.

I did color ways for my two favorite thumbnails, using mainly gradient maps at this stage to maintain a more cohesive and unified color set. For the crows, I wanted something dark and ominous, so I went with the first option, then expanded on it by adding more cold, blue tones.

For the final product, I made 2 crows and rigged them to easily add more variation. All the assets were made in Maya, focusing on topology and UV unwrapping, then sculpted over in ZBrush to create the hand painted, heavily textured look of the final work. This effect was further emphasized in Substance Painter. Final touch ups and paint overs were added in Procreate.

I decided to give him a gold color scheme to match that of his coat of arms, which can be seen as a gold griffon on a red backing, or a red symbol that greatly resembles the Auvergne flag on a yellow background. The main aspect of the design references the latter, making most aspects of the armor, notably the shoulder plate, rounded and softer, mimicking his crest. The most obvious references include the symbol being drawn directly onto the breastplate and the boots. His belt is another reference to it, containing the three circular buckles with rounded cloth falling underneath, forming a similar silhouette. The griffon crest is still incorporated, drawn onto the shoulder plate. The red and yellows also aided in creating an idea of fire, which I wanted in order to contrast with his connection to water.

Additionally, I wanted to give the character wing-like designs, while still maintaining the repeated motif of hands. To do this, I added repeated hands to the helmet in order to form the shape of a wing. This was originally added to the boots as well, however they were later removed as I felt that they distracted the viewer more than added to the character.
Finally, a small water spirit was placed with the character. The blue wisp represents the lady of the lake, referencing his interactions with her when he was tasked to throw the excalibur into the lake.

This character is still in progress. I'm planning to add a large, magical hand, to replace his missing one, along with more elements of fire surrounding it. The hands are designed to be made up of many smaller ones, with each miniature hand distorted and disproportionate to make up a section of a larger one. I wanted the hand to be fragmented, but for every part to work together as one. The hand is currently sculpted in Zbrush, but has yet to be retopologized and textured, and for fire to be added.

Ser Bedwyr was sculpted in Zbrush, then retopologized in Maya. The low poly character was then moved to Zbrush once more to add additional details that better fit the retopologized version. The model was textured in Substance Painter, and rigged in Maya.

The original idea of the Moonlit Giant was to create an environment that has lived through a disruption. I was very interested in the concept of destruction and apocalypse, so I came up with the narratives of a robot takeover, time freezing during a meteor shower, and the contrast between the populated past and an abandoned, overgrown future. I finally settled on the narrative of an ancient battle between a village and a giant, who is now frozen in space, since I found the composition in the thumbnail most dramatic and eye catching.

When greyboxing, my first goal was getting intense foreshortening on the giant's hand, and making the giant both fit in frame, but still feel very large and intimidating. I achieved this mostly through the camera by shifting the focal length to increase the size of the hand, playing with the depth of field to further push the giant back, and finally, placing the camera at a low angle to make the monster larger and more intimidating.To inform the viewer that the disruption happened in the past, I added the slow process of renovation. The houses affected by the attack have now started rebuilding, indicating that the villagers have begun to move on and move forward.

Bird concepting
- started with a bunch of ideas
- focused on biomes (originally plains) and saw the types of birds we wanted- initial concept for the shrikebeaked poko (the little blue bird) was made by amy chen- wanted the birds to be cute, have personality and be interesting to catch, but have a slight almost off feeling about them
- did this through dead eyes, slight specks of blood, general things that are slightly off putting - all the birds have teeth

Rigging!I used advanced skeleton at first, since they have a bird rig, but found that their rig for wings were actually not that great - there were too few bones to fold the wing nicely. So I ended up just making my own rig, which gave me more control of how I wanted the wings to fold.
I kinda brute forced it, there are still relatively few bones compared to more advanced skeletons, and the folding isnt technically anatomically correct, however it looked accurate enough to get away with.
How youre actually supposed to do it is make every single feather a separate mesh, and there's a way to fold/bend them all properly along a curve.
With the amount of birds there will be to make, I ended up going for simplicity, since that is easiest to recreate in multiple models and for future retargeting.I used set driven keys for the wings, and several other parts such as the feet and the tail
this is basically pre set animations that can be attatched to the value
it made life so much easier because if i needed wings to fold, i dont need to animate them over and over again, just once
I do think for the future I need to look into these a bit more though, because there is one issue with them -theyre fully locked down. If you want to alter one frame, if the bone is keyed to a set driven key, you cannot make any changed unless the connection is broken, which means the rest of the animation for that bone needs to be manually redone as well
Im sure there’s probably a work around for this, maybe with layers, but so far that was my only gripe with itThe biggest hurdle was retargeting
The problem was that our skeleton was not a humanoid, and it’s not the same skeleton
though it has all the same bones, they are each repositioned to fit the new bird
Youd think this is a common enough issue that it wouldnt be very hard, but it seems that the only good retargeting methods are extremely human focused
goal was to do it through bones, since the controls would have to all be redone when moving the skeleton, we wanted to just bake the animations to the bone and retarget that
Caused a lot of glitches
Bought a unity plugin, but that also did not work
Tried to force it into a humanoid retargeting system
I ended up giving up on the bone method and just redoing the controls for each bird and doing it through studio library, which was tedious
but i think doing that is probably better in the long run so I can tweak the animations much easier, and besides a few of the set driven keys being broken, which is a bummer, it went pretty smoothly.

Environmental art
- simple, sharp - one main tree but it was mostly bushes and little flowers

Shader yap, all shaders were custom made by me

During ideation, the initial plan for the gameplay HUD would be to create a radial menu for the player's inventory. However, those are more suited for inventory items that had varying qualities, and it seemed to create a larger separation between seeds. The scrolling interface, such as those in first person shooter gun inventories, would establish a closer connection between items- they would all be in the same category, and scrolling would be more intuitive to the player.I began with an extremely rough layout sketch, especially for the compendium, which made it easier to quickly visualize where elements would go before we more precisely blocked all the elements out in the wireframe.

Our assets and art direction was pretty set on from the start. We planned sharp and cut corners, and very flat, sleek shapes for buttons or menus.Icons, including the more detailed seed icons, followed a similar rule of having sharp edges.

Once our style was set, we could easily implement all our assets, namely our 9-slices, to create a more detailed and stylized wireframe. Here, there was opportunity to play around with colors. Originally we tried a blue color palette, however it felt too bright and I really wanted to pull in a bit more of that unsettling atmosphere, so we moved to a purplish brown, which gave us the color and whimsy we wanted, but still remained just dull enough.

The main issue we had were keybindings. During playtesting, we got non-game designers and game designers to try our gameplay HUD. Surprisingly, the feedback was very conflicting. The original keybind to pull up the gameplay HUD was to press and hold the shift key, and several people felt that it reminded them too much of sprint, and recommended the tab key. On the other hand, when we tried the tab key, the issue was that it was far to reach, and was tiresome for the hand, especially when holding. The final button we landed on was the right mouse button, which was easy to click, remained near the scroll wheel, and was not commonly used for anything else.

The original concept art was designed within the first week for a pitch, where we only needed to present the mechanics. At this point, we did not have the full narrative planned out. However, we decided what we wanted for the overall feel of the game, landing on cozy and humorous. I was tasked to create a basic design to reflect our goal, along with some standard layout ideas. I chose a style that was cell shaded and used lighter and more vibrant colors to capture the charm we envisioned.

Once the narrative and setting was decided– the player was a gecko in a world of amphibians and reptiles, I began a more in depth exploration of the style, specifically for character designs. The designs needed to remain simple and lowpoly, which worked well for the feeling we were going for and also the timeline we had.I tried to play with the shapes and exaggeration of the characters, personifying them and keeping them unrealistic. I found that the designs with longer limbs and slitted eyes gave too much of a mysterious undertone, so I stuck with the cuter, stubby character. Following this, I used the same base to design multiple different species, figuring out which species fit best with each character.

The bones were the most important aspect of the game. Each skeleton was based off of real life skeletons, before being simplified and, for later levels, distorted and altered. I had to play around with multiple ideas for how to display that distortion’s advancement with more than just shapes– a way to communicate with the player fully that the bones were strange. By playing around with color and pattern, I was able to achieve a smooth progression. The lizard’s deformations were inspired by the ankylosaurus and the narwhal was inspired by the helicoprion.

The largest challenge we faced was the scaling of difficulty. As the narrative progressed, the player was supposed to receive more and more distorted and strange bones, making it more difficult for them to figure out what the original creature was. Additionally, the amount of bones would increase, making the puzzle even harder. However, we found that even the skeletons in the earlier levels, notably the bat, had too many bones, overwhelming the player immediately. Through several different iterations, I removed several less important bones and merged some bones into one, creating an easier level and a more reasonable difficulty scale.The bat's wings were merged. The lizard's spine and shoulder bones were removed. The lizard's claws were combined into one. The tutorial fish's tail was also originally split into two before being combined.

The design of this game was intended to be lighthearted and silly, following a ridiculous storyline. To reflect this, the design of both the environment and the characters are bright and saturated, using a relatively minimal color palette. Each train line is centered around a singular color, helping the player easily differentiate between the sections, and correlate the cards and the map to the specific line. For example, the Pulse line is red, therefore cards that are exclusive to the Pulse line are also red, and the pathway on the map shares the same color. Same can be seen with the green and blue trains.

The only character that has a more diverse color pallette is the player, with its bright turquoise eyes contrasting to the pink and purple, allowing the player to stand out amongst the crowd. Still, I wanted the player’s colors to remain simple, to prevent messiness that could occur if one area has too many colors compared to the rest of the environment. To still achieve the main focus on the character, there is only one point of contrast on the eyes, allowing it to pop out.