2015: The Year of Dreams

Happy New Year everybody! It's pretty crazy that we're moving onto 2016 already, but before we do, I wanted to take a moment to look back at some cool things that happened in 2015. The gaming industry as a whole had a really good year, and a lot of amazing new surprises got announced throughout this trip around the sun. My New Year's resolution last year was to write a blog post a month. As you can tell, I fell a bit short of that goal, but I did at least manage to keep the blog somewhat active for most of the year. Here's hoping I continue that pace going forward.

In terms of art, I had one of my most productive years yet, so I'm definitely going to file 2015 on the "good shelf." Surviving in this industry is tough, and it can be really frustrating coming out of college and facing so many hurdles and rejection on the path to starting a career. But after a long time, I'm finally starting to feel more confident in my work and develop a more positive about my future. Hopefully it only gets better from here on out!

In 2015, I traveled to California three times (once for GDC, once for PSX, and once to teach at iD Tech Spring Break Camp), I spent the summer teaching in Seattle, I worked on my first ever Kickstarter campaign, I released my first ever mobile game on iOS, I got to work on my first Steam game, I got the chance to work with the wonderful folks at BrightCovers, and I worked on a whole slew of other interesting small projects. It was definitely a milestone year for me in terms of new experiences, and I'm really excited to see what comes next.

In these posts, I tend to have a lot of talking and not enough images (especially considering this is an art blog!), so I'm going to include a ton of pictures in this post. Without further ado, here's what I've been doing:

I've been doing a lot of work for Bright Covers, a local patio covering company here in Cleveland. I've been creating instructional videos for the assemblers as well as some promotional material to show off the product.

I came up with a few new rendering techniques along the way that I will definitely be utilizing again in the near future.


Here's the full animation that instructs owners how to construct their new unit.

I'm also in the process of creating some new mascot characters. This is still a work in progress, so he's not quite done yet. If you happen to attend any of the local home & garden shows though, you might be able to see the finished product!

As I mentioned, I also got to work on an early access Steam game called Grimoire: Manastorm. My role on Grimoire was mostly behind-the-scenes rigging and weight painting tasks, but it was a fun job nonetheless. If you follow the game on Steam, stay tuned for an upcoming update that will incorporate all of the cool cloth physics I've been working on!

On another note, I'm not sure if I posted this on the blog, but Wave Crash is officially out on iOS now! It's completely free and available right on your iPhone or iPad. Check it out! We put a ton of hard work into it. Going forward, our crew has some exciting new plans that may or may not include the use of VR headsets, but I'll talk more about that at a later date.

I also did a bunch of animation work earlier in the year. This is using a pre-rigged model, so the focus here is the wall running animation.

 As many cool projects as I worked on this year, I feel I didn't quite make as much personal artwork as I did in the past. I'm happy that work is keeping me busy, but it's still important to continue doing artwork for my own sake as well. And so for 2016, my goal is to draw one finished scene each month. I'm leaving the specifics of that requirement a bit open-ended, but each scene should be finished enough that I would be willing to submit it to my deviantArt gallery (and not in the scraps section!). I think it's an achievable goal, and it will be fun to go back to what got me into art in the first place: drawing for fun!

On that note, here's some of the personal artwork that I did manage to do this year. It's mostly related to The Nays (the series my sister and I created), so most of it hasn't been released online until now.


This was a Christmas present for my sister. Disclaimer: I have no claim own over any of the music, but the goofy voices are 100% mine!

These are clothing designs for two of my characters from The Nays, Shaw Braves and Chozu Eisu. They are two of the original characters from the beginning of the series, so they go through a lot of different designs.

 

And here we have a bunch of minor characters from The Nays. I've continuously been trying to draw every character in alphabetical order, but the series has quite the large cast so I'll probably be working on this until the end of time!

These are scenes from a fun 2-hour animation project I worked on back in September. The goal was to spend no more than 2 hours on each scene.

 For this one, I got inspired to make something using the old Gameboy color palette. This is Mar Keys from The Nays.

These are some new characters from the Shard of the Orient eventure in The Nays. This story is told in a somewhat unconventional way, and you can check out the official website here (the layout and pictures are still not 100% but the story is all up there). It will probably be like jumping into a random TV show on season 4 episode 7, but if you're interested feel free to read it!

And I think that sums up all of the more significant projects of the year. I warned you it would be a long post! Thanks for taking the time to check out all of my work. I don't have a huge following online or anything, but if just a handful of people find some of these pictures interesting, then maintaining this blog is all worth it! I think 2015 was a really great year and I plan to make 2016 even better. See ya guys next year. Until then... Adios!