GRIMWAR

Overview

Defy gravity and enemies alike in a high-speed world where magic and momentum collide! In this game, players run through the vast labyrinth that is the arch mage’s tower, trying to escape and wielding spell pages to do so.

GRIMWAR is the first game of it’s kind I’ve worked on before, being low-poly with an emphasis on minimal pixel density in textures. Though I’ve found the style difficult to adapt to, it’s taught me a lot about implementation and working with a low fidelity art style. Our Art Director was very strict on models never exceeding 300 polygons, a limit that was daunting yet forced me to really focus on shape and silhouette. 

My Work

I worked on the team as an Assistant Producer and 3D Artist. While my focus was on asset production, I also assisted the producer in the organization of the team, such as organizing the team’s documentation and focusing on marketing. 

A big project for me in this game was the Owlbear, which went through a couple of iterations both in mechanical design and character design before it was finalized. This model posed a particular challenge to me, since it was my first time making a character low poly, and a lot of my early attempts were outside our set polygon count limit. With help from the Creative Director, I was able to narrow the polygon down by utilizing alpha planes for details.

Another big project was the visual development of the third and final level, the Core. We knew we wanted the core to be an intense, visceral place that became more gorey and meat-filled as the player descended to the final boss of the game. To keep everything visually cohesive, I began using my early concept work (the meat deco concept art) to create a gradient map and shading style for implementation. I then took various images – of meat, wrinkled skin, molded walls – and placed the gradient map over it before shading it to look wet and meat-like.

The team settled on a final texture, which I hand-painted to tile in all 4 directions (funnily enough, this final texture didn’t start with a picture of meat at all – it was the inside of an orange peel) . I also painted the other textures to tile with the main meat texture, then assembled all of the textures into one 1024 x 1024 texture sheet. Artists were provided this texture sheet to texture their props and materials, and would align the UV shells accordingly. This was a great way to optimize the workflow and keep everything cohesive in the level. To ensure nothing looked too repetitive, we made variations of the tile sheet material too: one had a vertex shader so it would jiggle, and another animated the eyes to blink.

I also rigged the character for animation, which was a unique challenge when weight painting because of the low poly count.

Alongside 3D art, I also did concept art as well as made 2D assets and VFX. My primary focus outside of these elements was static props.

Reflection

GRIMWAR challenged me as both a 2D and 3D artist. I had initially thought the low poly art style would make production easier, but failed to consider that I had no experience with low-poly. It was more difficult than I anticipated, and takes a lot of care to not only make sure things look good, but that they are readable. Coupled with the low fidelity textures, my work on GRIMWAR pushed me to become more versatile as an artist and to learn how to mimic art style’s outside of my own.