Hello. Nice to have you on my humble portfolio!
In this post I will share with you the work that I did as a Technical Artist for the game PSG Football Freestyle from Hermit Crab Game Studio (Brazil).
This game was published as a OTT app by Gameloft (Worldwide), Pixtel (Europe) and Bemobi (Brazil). It is being soft launched in several countries as this post is written in the App Store and Play Store.
You can have a look into the game here if you have a Android:
PSG Football Freestyle on Play Store
For this particular project I have been working for 2 years as a Technical Artist. My main tasks were game art integration in all possible forms. As the team was lean, we needed to be versatile, so I did LOTS of codes, UI`s and shaders.
The main system of this project, for me as a Tech Art guy, was the cosmetics one. I had to define a export and naming pipelines/conventions for the artist to bring his assets to the project with minimal effort and work on a release level of quality right from the beginning, so stability was crucial.
This system was done in three major steps:
Custom Unity Editor
This one needed to be simple yet robust enough for the artist to setup new cosmetic meshes and skins easily.
Mesh Processing and Caching
This backend part was crucial for the work of this little mesh engine. It received the artist mesh as input, map the bones it was rigged on and stored necessary information into a file for fast loadings at runtime. Ah, sounds so simple right now!
Runtime Mesh Setup and Flexibility
This third part combines the last ones into one. As you can see in the gif, you can fully customize the characters with a broad range of items.
This uses the cached data to load the needed assets on the fly and combine them in one skeleton hierarchy.
Gameplay Animation Blending
The gameplay animations, aiming to make them as fluid as possible maintaining their believability, big focus on the anticipations, as the ball follows a physics based movement, it can be tricky to get it tuned right.
The Head Tracking for the character aim the head towards the ball whenever the Game Designer wishes on each specific movement.
The gameplay camera animations and slow time effect.
SHADERS AND SCENARIO BASED DYNAMIC MATCAP
This project required a specific shader for the characters and also a few generic shaders for basic rendering of opaque and transparent objects in the scenarios. But they needed to be custom shaders because of the possible low end hardware limitations that might be used by a player.
For the characters shader I mixed a solution of MatCap with dynamic light angle. This way the artist can finetune the light shading, and we could have several lighting conditions on a per scenario basis with different light directions.
So, cheap dynamic lighting with artistic fine tuning.
UI, UI ParticleS
As a UI programer and builder I try to closely match the mockup made by the UX/UI Artist. Seeking to convey the most ideal UI animations and feedbacks.
Other tasks on this project
- Daily Task/Mission System
A system integrated with PlayFab, to deliver daily tasks for the user to win some hard currencies. - Trick and Trick Sequence Creation Tool
A tool for the Game Designer build the game foundation objects the tricks (cards), that the player will use to compete against other players. - Several other minor implementations and bug fixing that I do not remember, 2 years of project at last!
At last, thanks for reading this job post!
Hope we can join in the opportunities that the future reserves to us!
Oh! Almost forgot, I am available to remote or relocation job opportunities.