UX and Front End Designer and Director, 2D Cinematic Artist and Animator, Narrative Designer
As of this moment, the game is pending announcement, but I have been authorized to release much more comprehensive samples of my work upon request: matthewschade@gmail.com
The IP is involved with a major motion picture studio. For three years I honed a diverse set of skills to all presentation and 2D art aspects of a major game release. And pretty darnly consistently, the executives from the aforementioned studio were impressed with these aspects of each new build. I created all menus and UI, 2D background presentation art and loading screens, as well as supplemental 2D animated cutscenes for the story mode of the game. I created them using a patchwork production pipeline that I was happy to augment myself and innovate within the bounds of to create lightweight yet artistically pleasing and consistent solutions for. Further to this I created concept art, presentations, layouts, style iterations, as well as menu trees for iterative design decissions throughout the production process.
My initial responsibility on this project was simply the design of all UI, menu, and graphic design elements. The sports themed game took place in the 70's era, so I designed and iterated, and we eventually agreed upon look based on 70's style broadcasts and print. I used bright colors, big presentation text, and strong, big shapes to convey the the style of the era, as well as the fast, arcady slant of the gameplay.
As is with small studios, my responsibilities soon grew to include 2D illustration/graphic art animations for story-mode cinematics, title sequences, and animated backgrounds for the menu flow. I drew on my visual arts background and eventually created a highly stylized cinematic style appropriate to the game's story and setting.
The experience was very challenging on all fronts. On the technology side, only a very limited number of Flash 6 functions could support the 'FiX' (Flash in XNA) tools in our pipeline. From hacking fonts, to precise bitmap ratios, to learning the capabilities of every minute nook and cranny of our programming pipeline, I did everything I could to squeeze every last drop of graphical capability out of our toolset.
Despite the challenges, an extremely cohesive and strong visual style was created for the entire presentation, UI, and story mode of the game. Experienced industry veterans and the IP’s mass media executives alike have reacted very positively to this style.
All of this added up to an extremely valuable learning experience, teaching me in leaps and bounds about not only art and technical skills, but also communication, production management, and with the limits of your toolset, not against them. As my high school art teacher used to say; "a good artist never complains about his tools".
Toolset: Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Audition, InDesign, Font Software, Source Control in Visual Studio
