ART DIRECTOR - Kingdom Under Fire: WarlorD - 3D Strategy Mobile game (ios/android)

Key Responsibilities:

  • Establish the entire Art Direction for the game.

  • Create Style Guide and benchmark assets for artists to reference off of.

  • Ownership of in-game scenes, from set dressing to final lighting with post process.

  • Manage technical issues and optimize for mobile platform.

  • Direct UI/UX design of the game.

  • Support & Mentor Artists.

As an Art Director, I cannot stress enough that KUF: Warlord art creation is a collaborative team effort made up of 10 artists. I am blessed and honour to be able to work alongside with seniors and junior artists to support and assist. Some of the other job responsibilities that wasn't mentioned above are:

  • Establishing art pipeline and process of making "strategy-esque" game assets for mobile platform.

  • Meticulous refining of UI elements for best readability.

  • Teaching Substance Designer and Substance Painter workflow/usage.

  • Teaching the Level Artist the ins and outs of the Unity 3D Engine.

  • Creation of benchmark assets:

    • Building assets used in game.

    • Sculpted in-game terrain using the Unity Terrain, later converted into mesh.

    • World Machine terrain backdrop.

  • Work closely with the Technical Director to achieve correct colour values with Gamma colour space but later turned into Linear color space with the Unity 3D engine support.

  • Various shader requests such as Terrain Splat Shader (that is not heavy as some of other market shaders), Vertex Blend Shader (fully utilizing vertex RGB values), Vertex-Animated Shader and Water Shader.

Concept Art: 

Here are some of the concept art that I did for the project early on. 

Level Art:

Terrain sculpting, Splat painting, World Machine Backdrops, Set dressing, Optimization.

Asset Creation:

Here are some of the assets I made. All of the assets are modeled in 3DS Max (low and high, when needed) and Textured in Substance Painter with Tiling Textures made within Substance Designer/Zbrush.

UI/UX Design

The team had a UI Artist before I joined so there was no clear artistic direction for the UI/UX design. Following are some samples of UI design I pitched to the studio.