The Art of Joshua Balcaceres

Vicious Circle

Had the pleasure to work on Vicious Circle with a great and talented team.

One of my responsibilities coming in was to switch the Art Style from an unsuccessful realistic and gritty style to our stylized look as seen here.

Established the visual Art Direction as well as rules for our stylized project such as the 15-meter rule, in which if a detail in any asset, including characters and weapons, is not readable within 15 meters away, the detail must get broader or do away with it entirely to reduce confusion and visual noise.

For the environments my responsibilities were, design the art style of the look of said environments, as well as put the pipeline of asset creation in which we iterated, quickly – given our deadlines.

Trained the art-team on asset creation using our new art style and direction, as well as well as established Smart Materials which can then be used to textured assets very quickly.

Responsible for delivering the Vertical Slice to our Studio heads and proving our new Art Style, in order to further prove the concept – as well as help build the 2 initial first levels in our game to establish level-creation pipeline and modularity.

Worked and trained our external partners CGBot with our new the art direction as well as delivering and integrating deliverables in our pipeline on time. Worked with production to establish schedule and goals for our external partners as well as weekly-checkins with them.

Took the responsibilities on top of my duties, of a Senior Tech Artist in getting our levels to Performance standards to our minimum Specs for our project, as well as place said standards within the environment team to deliver smooth levels, such as material count on objects, memory usage, vertex counts, establish texel density on all assets and budgets for portions of the level including Object count and Draw Calls.

Created VFX Particles for environments, such as doors, pick-ups,and environment blueprints as well as post-process particles and volumes such as dust and heat-waves.

I lit the project in it’s entirety, while also keeping performance standards, and budgets in mind – as well as held a Team-Wide seminar and trained the team to light in UE4, up-to and including Cost, impact, and basics of lighting in real-time engines.

Worked with Junior Animators to establish a pipeline for Emotes, and small animations in our project.

Performed monthly on-on-ones with the team to hear concerns and troubleshoot issues that arise during production.

Successfully shipped the game fully QA’d and performant, all in 11 months.

Environment work shown is also made possible with the great help of the environment team comprised of Markel Milanes and Ramond Torres.