Daniel Williams
/Technical Artist
ENDSTAR
I have the absolute honor of running a small but motivated art team, art directing, as well as co-project leading a collaborative online game about making games called Endstar.
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Starting a few years ago from scratch in Unity, we built up a strike team of engineers and artists and have been working on bringing real time collaborative creation of simple gameplay and level creation to life.
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You can even download and try it out! It's still early days, but it's shaping up to be pretty exciting!
Small but Powerful Art Team
I was able to get very lucky and build a small team, initially with just two artists working with me to define and test and iterate, building an art style together. Eventually we were able to grow a bit with two more artists, who adopted the style and helped us push even further immediately.
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Responsibilities
I meet a lot of demands on the team, Art Lead, Art Director, and Tech Artist... and co-project lead with our Lead Engineer.
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​​As co-project lead, I work alongside our Lead Engineer to envision what we want Endstar to become. We come from very different backgrounds, so there's always a tug of war, but the goal is to find the right level of compromise between ease of use, and complexity.
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That challenge has been an extremely interesting one, and I think we've both learned a ton about what makes a product... not just how to develop a game.
I had to help create the workflow pipleline, using Blender3d, and helping my artists acclimate to that. We picked that workflow because our SDK will allow users to upload content, and we wanted hobbyists and students who no longer have access to premium tools to be able to use our example files.
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As co-project lead, I work alongside our Lead Engineer to envision what we want Endstar to become. We come from very different backgrounds, so there's always a tug of war, but the goal is to find the right level of compromise between ease of use, and complexity.
​
That challenge has been an extremely interesting one, and I think we've both learned a ton about what makes a product... not just how to develop a game.
Tech Artist
Art Director
As an Art Director I worked with my artists to create the bright style in Endstar. We wanted to find a balance between younger audience games, and vibrant styles like Fortnite. We spent a lot of time testing various proportions for the characters, and levels of detail frequency on our environmental materials.In the end we settled on something pretty cool, and it has passed the smell test for a wide range of ages we've tested against. We didn't want young audience members to feel like they were being patronized, and older audience members to feel like they were being made to play a something they might feel embarrassment at. So far... we've successfully threaded the needle!
