USC Advanced Games Projects

Sky Command is a cooperative, 2-player VR game. It is designed to be in a VR arcade or part of similar location-based entertainment; it is a 15 minute experience of frantic communication and riotous action. With your partner, you have to fly an airship through enemy territory and destroy critical enemy infrastructure, all while defending against enemy ships and repairing damage aboard your own. We aim to have players to laugh, scream, and shout, and then go and pull another of their friends in to play again.

The game was selected as one of 6 greenlit projects from over 20 student pitches for the USC Games Advanced Game Projects capstone course. I worked as Art Lead and Co-Game Director (with Matt Levonian). We built a team of ~20 students to develop the experience, and finished it for the May 2018 USC Game Expo. As Creative Director, I ensured that each team member understood the experience goal and aesthetic of the game, guiding development and keeping it inline with our ultimate vision. As Art Lead, I managed ~7 other artists and coordinated with designers, engineers, and the narrative team to create a cohesive visual look for the game and its environment.

In addition to management tasks I was also the lead artist which involved:
– Modeling and Sculpting for the majority of the in-game assets. (Player characters, props, interior & exterior environments)
– Creating PBR textures for individual and procedural use
– Rigging and Animating
– Creating diegetic UI elements
– Skybox Textures
– Logos & Graphic Design

The last message Lumen received from her pen pal came from a tourist planet thriving with exotic wildlife. When Lumen arrives on the planet, however, it is very different from the postcards: the animals have mutated beyond recognition, the resorts are deserted, and the sun itself has gone dark. Alone and afraid, Lumen must travel from light into darkness to uncover this ruined world’s secrets, and discover what happened to her missing friend.

From Light is a 2D puzzle platformer utilizing mechanics based on photographic concepts. The core gameplay consists of understanding the game mechanics- freeze frame and light drawing – to solve increasingly difficult puzzles. The targeted game feel is introspective, calming, and thought provoking.

From Light was submitted and accepted as one of the PAX 10 for PAX Prime 2015. Since then the team has grown and the game’s vision has developed drastically from a small game made in an intermediate game design class.

We went back to pre-production during fall 2015-spring 2016 while we overhauled the game, its narrative, and its artistic vision.

I was the Art Lead for the scope of the game at USC, and recruited additional artists, as well as coordinated the student art team, assigned tasks, co-led world-building with the narrative team, created concept art, made assets (most notably  the emissive interacibles), and did logo design.

From Light was one of USC Games’ Advanced Games (capstone) projects for the 2016-2017 school year. The game directors who were graduating seniors are currently seeking publishers for From Light.