Edward
Felix
Joining the development team of the successful VR game Walkabout Mini Golf, I took the role of Modelling Lead, predominantly working in the art pass for new levels, working primarily in Blender, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Gravity Sketch.
For each level, a game designer would create a layout of each mini golf hole, and provide a block out of the space the player would move around in. This would be play tested and refined until it was approved and passed onto me for the main art pass. The art pass consisted of taking each area of the block out and replacing all the temporary geometry with custom meshes and textures. For some levels, a concept artist is used to establish a feeling of a level and plan out important details for me to recreate. In the case of the space level, I was given freedom to develop an aesthetic as I saw fit, checking in with the main team to ensure what was being developed was appropriate for the game. To assist in this, an asset pack was provided, and used to source small props to place in some of the larger spaces. Once the art pass was completed, a technical artist did a lighting pass and worked to make sure everything rendered smoothly.
As the main platform for the game is the Oculus Quest, a self-contained VR headset running on a mobile chipset, graphical processing was incredibly limited, requiring a lot of care to be taken in creating assets that wouldn’t be taxing to render at the required 90fps in 4K. This included making sure all materials used a single atlas texture, and modelling custom LODs for heavy geometry.
Outside of the level art passes, I have been in charge of designing the collectible golf balls that players find hidden throughout the levels, and the golf putters that players unlock through completing challenge “fox hunts”.
Beyond creative work, I worked to help lead the members of the modelling team, ensuring work matched expectations while still being performant when rendering on limited VR systems.
