By: Lizard Lair Games
Overview
Volcanewt is a flashy, comedic adventure with darker undertones featuring the Volcanewt, a massive newt that stomps through several cities creating a wake of destruction in his path.
The Volcanewt annihilates human cities in its path and crushes their pitiful but growing resistance with lumbering attacks to showcase the strength and power of this enormous beast. The Volcanewt slashes through buildings, spits fire at the opposition, and uses his tongue to devour fleeing civilians.
My role as Art Lead
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As the Art Lead for Volcanewt, I oversaw the artistic direction and development, guiding a team of 7 artists to create immersive low-poly game environments, characters, and assets.
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My role involves creating a visual style based off of our Creative Director's vision for Volcanewt. As well as, ensuring cohesion across all artistic elements, and fostering creativity while adhering to project timelines and technical requirements.
I collaborated closely with other leads to ensure that our art enhances gameplay, narrative, and overall player experience, striving to deliver a visually captivating and cohesive game world.
3D Art
Rocks displayed in scene
One of my favorite 3D models I had made for Volcanewt was this stylized rock cluster. I created the rocks in Zbrush and brought the model into Maya for retopology & unwrapping so I could bake and texture the mesh in substance painter.
I created the low-poly character models for Imari Porter the News Anchor & The General. These two characters are the only two in Volcanewt that have dialogue, and they appear in the HUD to provide narrative context.
The goal of the characters was to create low poly characters that have exaggerated personalities.
Characters in HUD cinematic
2D Art
I was often tasked with creation of Volcanewt's 2D art assets. One of the pieces I had created early on in the project was this splash art.
UI & HUD
Throughout production, I created most of the UI and HUD elements. One of my favorite pieces was the destruction meter & Newtcon timer.
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The destruction meter was one of the most challenging UI elements to create as we wanted to find the best way to convey how much of level the player needs to destroy before completion.
Other than the destruction meter I had also created 3 unique boss health bars, the players health bar, 3 ability icons, and news cast elements.
Pause Menu
One of my favorite pieces I had made for Volcanewt was 2D assets for the pause menu. The goal was to create something unique that would standout while being a little goofy.
Abilities & Ability Concepts
Abilities was something that the creative director & I had spent a lot of time working on concepts that would properly convey each player ability at glance.
Tools I used for this project
