STAR WARS: GALAXY OF HEROES – EA CAPITAL GAMES – iOS, Android
SWGoH, as the community calls it, is one of the most successful Star Wars games of all time having (by now) surpassed 1 billion dollars in lifetime revenue. I’m the Lead Artist on the team and over the past two years I’ve contributed as a production artist, led the art team, handled communication with Lucasfilm and interacted with our (very!) passionate community, including being lucky enough to represent the art team on the Star Wars show.
A lot of the work is not community facing, but I was also lucky that my concepts for the Geonosian Brood Alpha, a brand new character to the Star Wars Universe, were shared with the public!
I’m also heavily involved with our cinematic work. Storyboarding every event, building them in Unity and directing our Marketing team in order to recreate them for their own use. The Chewbacca Legendary event is a good example of this, but there are plenty more in our YouTube page
Most recently I championed and directed the overhaul of our character creation pipeline, the new Galactic Legends and the characters involved with that slate are great examples of the strides the art team has taken under my direction
INDIVISIBLE – LAB ZERO GAMES – PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox One
Indivisible is a hybrid platformer/RPG developed by Lab Zero Games, the studio behind the critically-acclaimed fighting game Skullgirls, and published by 505 Games. Indivisible shipped in October of 2019, check it out!
As a contract 3D artist on the team, I modeled and made base textures on various props and other game objects.
The in-house team then polishes the textures further and composes the assets for in game use. You can find some of these assets in the screenshots below.
STEAMBIRDS ALLIANCE – SPRYFOX – PC
A F2P Co-Op MMO Roguelike (phew!) experience from Spry Fox!
I was brought in to give the game a complete graphical overhaul. starting with swapping the 2D environments and ships with full 3D art.
The art team consisted of an art intern (Ally Overton) and myself. I handled Visual Development, concepting, modeling, coloring, lighting the environments, playtesting, pipelines .. you name it. Incredibly fun project and team. Available on Steam.
TOTAL CONVERSION FROM 2D TO 3D
With a 6 month timeframe, my primary task was to convert every level into 3D. This involved creating a pipeline from scratch, focusing the proper tools and methods for one artist to convert 20+ environments.
VIDEO
CONCEPTS
Visual Target, once we decided to go with a 3D pipeline we need to prove out that a minimal, textureless solution could be visually striking
Early 3D test. Purpose was to test visual impact of parallax movement and possible sense of depth
With a very small art team, I had to come up with a 3D tile system that would allow for a good number of visual variety. This was an early test that proves out the pipeline
SCREENSHOTS
TASTY TOWN – JAM CITY – mobile (cancelled)
A mobile, free to play experience that combines cooking games with city builders! I served as Art Director on this project for over a year. 
HIGH CONCEPT
We knew we wanted Tasty Town to have a unique artstyle. Chef/Restaurant games were particularly popular at the time and we wanted to differentiate ourselves, here are some of the (very) early ideas we had
Eventually, CJ Guzman joined the team and brought with him a very clean, pleasant visual execution we felt was a strong step in the right direction
Concept by CJ Guzman
We narrowed our focus and ended up with a Visual Target that resonated really strongly with the team and we could reproduce in Unity fairly easily
SCREENSHOTS (PRE ALPHA)
RESTAURANT CONCEPTS
For the restaurants and their indoor stylings we went through a similarly rigorous process of revisions. Finding the right amount of detail, perspective and theming proved difficult but extremely rewarding. From the more “literal” designs to something that feels more pleasant and celebratory
These designs, while were somewhat effective, felt entirely too safe and sterile. We didn’t want the player to feel like a line cook, we wanted to be more playful and aspirational. You can start seeing how we deliberately transitioned to the style that we ended up with by giving each restaurant a distinct, strong personality that carried it both outdoors at a more macro level and indoors at the micro level
To bring it all home, we added building animations that would play to let the player know the restaurant was ready to interact with, this way we had the player interact with the world and stay in it without the need of a UI layer. Disclaimer, the game would never be this bouncy, this was also a performance test, haha
STYLE GUIDE
As the Art Director, creating a style guide is crucial for a game like this. Posting all of it here would be a bad idea, but here are some good examples. Jam City ended up using it as an example to help other projects get started
CHARACTERS
We were lucky to have Stephanie Liaw as our character concept artist, we focused initially on our title character, which went through several iterations
We also wanted to anchor each restaurant or market to an NPC. These are the design for the baker and the grocer
This is CK who attended the Italian restaurant
And of course, the customers! design called for a strong cast of VIP customers that would have a personalized story for each, so each time you would see them walking around town youd make sure to give them your full attention
HEROES: ISLANDS OF ADVENTURE – KIWI – mobile (cancelled)
Heroes was a real time Action RPG for mobile devices. For this project I pulled double duty as Art Director and Lead Artist. I managed a team of around 10 artists and 3 outsourcing groups for the year we were in production.
TRAILER
Our launch trailer was produced by Exodo, I created the storyboards and supervised production of the trailer
WORLD DESIGN
It took us a while to find our style. Kiwi had not ventured into the fantasy RPG genre before so this was unfamiliar ground
Very early days, much closer to the restricted tile sets from earlier Kiwi games
Here I wanted to go “all out” what if we didn’t have to worry about engine limitations? The company needed a big vision so it could move forward
Eventually, we found our niche. A tighter camera angle that could fit our budget, a more intimate experience that would be clearly visible on a small screen. Fun, bold, colorful shapes. The following visual taarget gave the team a clear vision to pursue
Visual Target in Photoshop
Next came the challenge to be able to pull off this look in our interface-less, self made Java engine (libGDX represent!) with 3 artists. The following pipeline is something we could manage at a high quality bar
Using that method, we completed the Forest tileset, seen below
Game ready isometric tileset. The smaller grass tiles are seamless within each other while the decor tiles are made to overlap and hide any connecting points while providing enough variety
This ended us giving a final in-game result that we felt was extremely close to our Photoshop mockup
In-Game assets as seen in our engine
We used this throughout the game as we built several more tilesets
CHARACTER DESIGNS
The heroes also went through several concept phases. I tried a lot of different styles in order to find something our players would connect with
Once we had our core Hero design, we came up with different reskins per character archetype
We also designed late game Legendaries that would represent the character class at its highest power level
Promo illustration featuring our main characters, made it as a way to motivate the team
For the enemies in the game, I created a new race of creatures. Simple charming designs that described a tribe with their own history and customs
Models by Omar Sealtiel
XAVIER GARCIA 