Skylanders: Battlegrounds
iPad and iPhone
Being Art Lead on a handheld has many challenges. But this project posed even more than the usual. I was given a small team, mostly made up of VFX artists and a couple of UI folks. We were given a pretty short amount of time as well. My responsibilities included scheduling, concepts, asset/ level construction, lighting, and mentoring/ supporting the artists. I ended up asking my VFX counterpart to share in the responsibilities because it was a great deal to manage.
The image below shows our main map. Given time constraints, I needed to take advantage of existing "Skylander" assets and optimize them to suit the handheld memory limitations. This wasn't easy because the assets needed to be readable on a smaller screen - they were console assets designed for television. The textures needed to be optimized, yet still hold onto the flavor of its original size. We thought it would be cool to get a board-game feel to it so I kept the characters at a large scale but reduced the elemental specific assets in size to add a little more depth to each tile.
The arena screens needed to be built the same way as the map screen in terms of asset harvesting and refactoring. I staged the arenas so that the details stayed at the edge of the screen as to not intrude into the game-play area. To light the maps, we used the bake solution from Call of Duty called Arclight to bake all of our lightings to atlases.
