I joined Big Fish Vancouver in August 2012 again working in an art generalist role. This was my first experience working on a small team (just seven) and I really enjoyed the diversity of tasks. Over the next 3.5 years, two of which in Seattle WA as a technical artist, I became acquainted with Unity and broadened my rigging and Python skills. In December 2015 I left Big Fish Seattle to be closer to family and pursue opportunities in British Columbia.
Six months after I was hired, in March 2013 the Vancouver team was handed a new project. Gumball Heroes was ambitious on paper, especially for a small satellite office, and required a significant re-think of our in house workflow and technology base. We buckled down and by August had created over a dozen playable demos and the foundation for an art pipeline and a content delivery platform. That month it was announced the the Vancouver studio would close and the project would slowly migrate to the Seattle head office for principle development. Several of us were offered transfers and I took the opportunity to join team down south.
In Seattle, my role shifted to technical art. I was tasked with establishing a file structure and asset naming convention, maintaining and expanding our mobile shader library, collaborating with engineers to develop an improved character and animation pipeline, developing Maya tools to support said pipeline, and general documentation on all the former. In addition to these technical tasks I was responsible for character rigs and prefab maintenance, prototyping art and design concepts (through pre-vis cinematics and demo assets), and general support for UI, FX, environments, and animation. In May 2015 a playable demo of Gumball Heroes was released on iTunes Canada.
