Project Hawkins

An open world MMO on mobile

This mobile cooperative MMO featuring an open world, driving mechanics and points to score for your faction through mini games was developped during my time at Gabsee. It fostered a community of teenagers and young adults, offering them a safe space to talk and play together in a cozy world inspired by american national parks in the late 80’s.

Together with the art team (we were two artists and a technical artist) we created a functional open world on mobile, with the constraints that it implies : create a world with enough relief so that parts of it could load and unload without looking odd, intensive use of LODS and billboards, packing of textures and use of small atlases to spare memory.

Building Lakewood

I worked on building the open world of Lakewood as an Art Director, Environment artist, Level designer and Level builder, within a team of two artists and one technical artist. To create this huge map with four different biomes (forests with high and low foliage variations, harvested fields, desert, red canyons) we took direct inspiration from the state of Oregon, Arizona and Utah. As we wanted to create a cozy atmosphere for this coop game, we went for a vibrant, painterly and warm art direction, with a soft and stylized shape language which also fit with our performances constraints. The landscape was created with the Unity landscape tool and custom made brushes by our technical artist. We used Substance Designer and Photoshop to make our terrain textures, Speed Tree for our foliage, shaders in Shadergraph, rocks with Maya and Substance Painter. Roads were a custom tool developped by our team.

While creating Lakewood, we also designed point of interests and outposts to fight robots in (PVE). We made them modular so that we could make lots of variations using the same assets.

Building Lakewood High, a social hub

Between game sessions, players would wait for the next one in the courtyard of Lakewood High, talk, walk around, use emotes, and take selfies. I worked on the level design of this space, from greyblocks to producing the 3D assets, materials and shaders.

Making avatars and customization items

Together with the art director, the art team established the look of the avatars. We made various clothes, haircuts, shoes and accessories 80’s inspired for players to wear and create their unique style.

Directing in game cinematics

Occasionally, we needed to create in game cinematics or create video content using in game functionalities, using the Unity Timeline tool. This way, I’ve also worked on videos to express an art direction or an action happening in game. Here’s one we creating together with the other artist of the team, in a couple of days :