Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery mobile game [Jam City 2017 - Present]
I have been a part of this game since its inception as a 3D Art Director. I helped defining the style, established the art pipeline and continue to maintain quality.
This was the studio's second 3D game, first story game, and its first time using real time lighting. We wanted to push the visual fidelity from our previous game, with a more detailed style and atmospheric lighting to support the narrative. Using a proprietary engine was a challenge but allowed us to hand craft technologies that are not usually available and push the technical boundaries.
Over 150 unique environments, 500 characters, 500 avatar outfit pieces and 1000 props have been created so far.
Environments
Our environments were a close representation of the movie sets but with details simplified, colors amplified and textures stylized.
They were all built in Maya, including the baked and real time lighting. Our Maya shaders are identical to the game ones, providing the artists with accurate feedback in Maya.
A nesting system of scenes built in Maya allowed us to create different light setups and layouts and level designs using a single model file.
Characters
Our characters had to follow similar rules as the environments, while ensuring we could get the actors' resemblance when applicable and share as many rigs/animations as possible.
All characters were lit in real time, with custom shaders to fake SSS and rim lighting.
Avatar
The decision to use a customized avatar came late in pro-production, after most of the animations were created. The solution involved a new skin shader, interchangeable eye and mouth pieces, and intermediate joints not found in the animation rigs.
Shaders
Using a proprietary engine to build our first real time lighting game meant we had to create all of our shaders from scratch. I worked with engineers to write a custom exporter using Maya's ShaderFX, which I used to export all the shaders I created the game.
Scene Creator Tool
We didn't have a game editor such as Unity or Unreal for this game. All game logic and data was created in Google Sheets, and while that was fine for older builder games, we needed some sort of 3d scene creator for a story game like this one.
The ideal solution, a Content Implementation Tool that was later developed. However, due to the long development time it would take, we built a tool within Maya. This would allow designers to place all the necessary elements and export them to the Google Config Sheets. I designed most of the tool and its workflow, but the final result was built by the tech artists.
Content Implementation Tool
While using Maya as a level builder for Harry Potter - Hogward's Mystery was getting the job done, we soon reached its technical limitations. Loading big scenes was slow, previewing animation in context was tricky, connecting game logic was impossible and the feedback loop was just too long. For this game especially, adding large amounts of content fast and reliably was extremely important.
My solution was a tool that can be used in a browser where designers can build levels, artists can check their work, animators can create sequences and content managers can implement chapters. The tool will replace Maya for designers and most of the work done in spreadsheets.
The tool is currently being developed at the studio. Below are some of the specs I created for the pitch and that are being used as guidelines from the engineering team. The different parts of the tool (tabs) are being worked in order so that they can be rolled out individually.