I arrived Hyperion Realms about a year into their preproduction on Venture. It was an open world survival crafting experience in Unreal 5. The studio was preparing to pitch for their second round of funding and my overall task was to take the amazing work they had done up to that point and add as much brand identity and visual interest as possible. My time ended up being defined by four distinct stages:
1)Align with the team on the state of the project, lore, and game direction.
2)Beautify the playable.
3)Work with concept art outsourcers to demonstrate Venture as an iconic and striking IP to external partners. 4)Pivot the project to a new art style after an IP partner stepped into the mix.
The art team on this project:
Flor Coletta - 3D Lead
Bryan Venzen - Contract VFX Artist
Sterling Reames - Contract Tech Animation
Terraform Studios - Concept outsource studio
Dash Nemeth - (Our CEO and Game Director) Tech Art
1)Align with the team on the state of the project, lore, and game direction.
2)Beautify the playable.
3)Work with concept art outsourcers to demonstrate Venture as an iconic and striking IP to external partners. 4)Pivot the project to a new art style after an IP partner stepped into the mix.
The art team on this project:
Flor Coletta - 3D Lead
Bryan Venzen - Contract VFX Artist
Sterling Reames - Contract Tech Animation
Terraform Studios - Concept outsource studio
Dash Nemeth - (Our CEO and Game Director) Tech Art
I spent several weeks onboarding and aligning with Dash, the Game Director, to understand his vision for the product. We filled a Miro board with notes reference images and direction, which I winnowed down to succinct visual direction. We then got to work on the playable. Below is the state the game was in when I arrived on the project.
Flor, Dash and I worked in tandem to polish. Small team scrappiness was the order of the day. I focused on atmosphere, implementing VFX, materials implementation and providing art direction and paint overs to Flor and Dash. We ended up in a more warmly chromatic and fantastical place that the team and I were very happy with. I learned a lot about procedural generation, VFX and Unreal 5 in the process.
While polish on the playable was ongoing I focused on the third task. I hired the fabulous folks at Terraform Studios to help us infuse the slide deck with great concepts. It was important that these concept show as full a spectrum of mood as possible and feel iconic. I was incredibly pleased with their work.
Here is an examples of a character brief I created before the contract with Terraform began. We had very little time for exploration so I made sure to be very clear about what I believed we would need from each piece.
An example of feedback over an early sketch for this character.
And the final. I was very happy with the quality and speed of work. Cheers Terraform studios!
Similar brief for an environmental piece.
And the final. Again fantastic work.
At this point the project pivoted. An awesome IP holder had come onboard and the art team overhauled all of our assets to bring what we had developed with Venture into alignment with the new IP. I developed a bunch of assets in VR that Flor was able to implement and upgrade. Dash delivered some critical post process and material work and I leveraged the knowledge I had built up with atmosphere, VFX and materials to dial it all in. 100% a team effort I am still amazed we were able to pull off.
Some character concept art and Flor's resulting visual prototypes.
A piece of early pitch concept to continue dialing in the look.
Despite the great work funding did not materialize and the studio shuttered. I was very happy I took on this role, it was a great learning experience and the team was so skilled and dedicated. I feel that we achieved some very great results.