The Art of Flight

The Art of Flight is the first published Steam game I’ve gotten the chance to work on thanks to Collin Eye and I learned so much about game art pipelines and painting custom normal maps for each asset. I was approached by Collin Eye in the spring of 2024 with an offer to the lead 3D artist for Et Al Games newest project, The Art of Flight.

I got the opportunity to work on ships like the Medusa, Prison Ship, Seeker, Interceptor, Scorpions, the Magician, Manta-Ray, Grenadier, Med-ship, multiple asteroid variants, The Anchor boss, and The Horns boss. I got to design most of these ships from scratch and the ones I didn’t design from scratch the Et Al Games team already had a really solid base design to work from.

My inspiration for many of the paint jobs came from insects and cephalopods, Collin Eye wanted to push the art direction in a more organic smoother style so despite the low poly count each ship has custom painted normals to give softer lighting. Initially I tried hand painting the normals by hand without the use of extra programs and add-ons in Blender but quickly found that reproducibility was a real issue if I needed to update the normal maps. After doing some more research and looking through the options for Blender at the time I chose Curve Painter by FFuthoni, an Indonesian 2D & 3D artist on YouTube for the flexibility and use of Blender Geometry Nodes which really helped bring the whole project to life.

The most challenging asset of the whole game was The Horns boss ship which required 3 separate maps due to the destructibility of the guns, shield generators, and finally the ship itself.

Left to Right: baked flat shaded objects normals, painted object normals with strokes, finished painted normals, gun turrets, and shield generators.

The Geometry Node powered Curve Painter add-on by FFuthoni allows you to import your model to be painted and you can use either your default normals or baked normals. My favorite part is that it uses splines to sample a alpha brush texture sheet that you can remake to fit whatever brush stroke or shape pattern you want, this add-on really has tons of versatility. Since it uses splines to sample its brush strokes you can re-import your model with default normals or a baked normal map and it will resample all of the brush strokes so you can seamlessly update your asset.

I chose to go with object space normals instead of tangent space normals due to the greater color palette and the surface details it showed compared to tangent normals. Object normals are technically more limited than tangent space normals due to model animation breaking them but since none of the ships would be rigged and simply rotate and move in space it would give significantly better lighting readability with the dynamic lights from projectiles and explosions.

Collin Eye was very supportive through the entire process and really helped me nail down my designs without over complicating their concepts, he also helped me with these in-engine top-down beauty shots for each of the assets I made. I tried to order them in the way that you will encounter them when you play The Art of Flight now on Steam.

The Art of Flight is now available on Steam for Microsoft Windows and the Valve Steam Deck
Click here to purchase and play for yourself!

 MechOS Virtua Truce Plus

MechOS was inspired by the Armored Core series on the PlayStation 1 and made for the Society of Play InspireJam back in February 2022. The InspireJam was based around finding things that inspire us and making something inspired by those things to pass on our love.

For the duration of the two-week game jam I got to work on the environment art including modeling, surfacing, and asset integration using Git into Unity.

Canicular

My Capstone Project, Canicular, is a fantastical cross-media project in the style of a Nintendo 64 game with a companion project in the style of a Nintendo Gameboy Color game. The project is focused on a fantastical island perpetually at the end of summer built around seven different regions each centered around a color and job. Canicular’s main character is Berdi, an almost 16-year-old scientist who just moved to the island and is traveling the island’s regions trying to make friends learn more about himself. Throughout the course of the game Berdi and their friends learn of how the Lanark Corporation is slowly taking over the island and shutting down the local businesses that have helped keep the island self-sufficient and running smoothly. All the adults on the island have gone a little crazy for Lanark’s new stores and its up to the gang of kids to restore balance before Oryx, the new smart assistant from Lanark is able to take over fully and change the way of life on the idyllic island forever.

Main Character Designs - by Grace Vu

NPC Designs - by Grace Vu

Music - by Mickey Bess

Gameboy Color Game

I am currently still working on optimizing the map you see above to fit into a single Gameboy Color game but currently I have a playable partial map without music available for download. This game is a port of the full N64 style cinematic into a real, playable Gameboy GB file that you can emulate and play on your own hardware using Retroarch.
> Download Here <

Credits

Canicular Production Crew

Director & Producer - Sam Leeke

Character Designer - Grace Vu

Project Manager - Lynn Joustra

Musician - Geoffrey-Michael Bentley

Unreal Technical Director - Paden Houck

Lead Character Modeling Artist - Mayson Bray

Editorial Lead - Mayson Bray

Prop Modeling Team

• Autumn Engdahl

• Percy Bobo

Rigging and Animation Consultants

• Kyle Anderson

• Hayden Staples

Special Thanks to

• Ana Villarreal

• Annie Wu

• Sinclair King

• The Society of Play crew

Trick or Meat

Trick or Meat was made for the Trick or Treat Jam put on by Society of Play during October 2021.

Tyler Tomaseski was our team lead and wanted to use Trick or Meat to attempt to replicate the look of Die Hard Trilogy on the PS1 which utilized flat textured polygons rigged on a very basic skeleton to cheaply populate a 3D environment with dozens of NPCs on the PS1 architecture.

Team

• Eric Grossman

• Evangelina Hsu

• Liz Gravis

• Tyler Tomaseski

Lair of The Trash King

Lair of The Trash King was my second ever game jam game for the Pompous Trash Jam game in 2021.

The goal of the Pompous Trash Jam was to make a game that is about pompous trash or literally is pompous trash. These games embraced what make them flawed or weird and didn’t try to make everything polished and clean, just honest and full of heart.

I got the chance to do all the pixel art trash items that spawn whenever the trash bags littered around the dump are destroyed along with the UI which was also pixel art.

This game is about a racoon named Craig who lives in a trash can and uses the trash can lid as a tool or weapon to bash their way through the lair of the trash king and finally defeat the trash king for the last time.

Our team used Unity, Git, Blender, Pixaki, Visual Studio, and FL Studio across two weeks to put this experience together.

Team

• Andrew Bond-Harris

• Ben Hopkins

• Dak Johnson

• J.C. Steed

• Liz Gravis

• Richard Klassen

• Sam Leeke

• Sammy Mahmoudi