He-Man: Battle Arena
Project Name:
Prior to working on Sonic Speed Simulator, my first project at Gamefam was working on He-Man: Battle Arena in a small team of about 6 developers. My contributions were to the original version of the game, which blended an explorable open world with optional Hero-based PVP combat in arenas. This version of the game made it through beta and to an initial release, but it was eventually pulled and the game was reworked by into a more cartoony simulator to cater toward a younger audience.
Responsibilities:
Lead the Level Design and Art Pass for all of the environments. This consisted of the Badlands Overworld, Castle Grayskull, and three Arenas.
Greyboxing environments.
Art and Lighting passes.
Art Assets (Prop modeling, landscapes, 2D textures, UI design, optimization (triangle reduction, etc.)
Scripting several aspects such as the "Sky Sled" vehicle and it's custom mobile controls, as well as the Interaction, Dialogue, and Puzzle systems.
Optimizing environments for mobile performance on devices as old as the iPhone 6.
Role: Level Designer, 3D Artist, Generalist
Company: Gamefam, Mattel, Netflix
Blockout Comparisons
From Blocks to Art
As this is a fairly old project and I don't have many screenshots from the time, I can't provide a detailed level breakdown like I could for Emerald Hill Zone. Regardless, here are some pictures comparing blockouts to final visuals for a few areas in the game.
Snake Skull Island:
Perhaps one of the coolest looking locations in the floating island-filled Badlands, Snake Skull island started as a rather unassuming blockout that focused on providing a bite sized hill to explore. However, I felt like something was missing during the Art Pass and brought in a Snake Skull created by our Character Artist for the Snake Mountain Sacrifical Chamber arena. I then added some large stone arches to give the appearance of a snake wrapping the island.
Castle Grayskull Storage Room:
One of the smaller key places from the show, the storage room was a bit difficult to create a copy of as it's in near complete darkness. Still, I took note of some key elements such as the stacked books, cloth-covered bookshelves and pillars to create a fun, atmospheric location within Castle Grayskull.
