 Professional Experience |  Teesside University |  Personal Projects |
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Click on the images above to see the projects I've worked on.
Products I've worked on, during my time at Tactile Games UK (Formerly Strawdog Studios)
Simon's Cat Story Time
Embark on a brand new adventure with Simon's Cat, Kitten, more old friends, and a bunch of brand new faces. Discover what lurks beyond the garden walls, solve the secrets to untold history, and thwart the plans of a mysterious company and their own plans for the land.
As the sole designer on the project initially, I was tasked with developing initial design documentation for features, story, IP theming, and worked closely with the technical director and producer on many other aspects of the concept phase of development.
Heading into production. I worked with a repurposed visual scripting tool, similar to other projects at Tactile, in order to create the majority of cutscenes for the initial story chapters. As our project grew, we knew we needed some tools unique to our game to help with the situations that came our way, so I worked alongside the programmers to iron out and make the story creation process more efficient.
Once production picked up, we took on a designer from another project, in which I helped them get an understanding of the tools we used, and set up a design bible for us to follow for the project. We both then saw the project through to completion, as it became a key part in setting up the family category for Apple Arcade.
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Lily's Garden
Romance? Garden? Puzzles? YES! Lily’s Garden is all this and so much more. Renovate the garden and solve challenging puzzles with this relaxing and romantic free match-3 blast game!
For this project, I took on the role of cinematic artist, and helped with the production of story scenes within the game. Working alongside a small group of cinematic artists, we worked closely with many disciplines (from artists, to script writers, to QA and everyone in between) within the company in order to put everything together; to create, polish, and release chapters for the newest game by Tactile Games. This is a live game, with updates coming every week.
We worked with a repurposed visual scripting tool in order to create what we needed. Along with the other Artists, I helped streamline the process by improving the tool, adding new features, and making existing ones more efficient for what we needed.
The game is available on the iOS app store, Google Play, and the Amazon Appstore.
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Penny and Flo: Finding Home
Love? Friendship? Mansion? Puzzles? YES! Penny & Flo: Finding Home has it all. Renovate the mansion and solve challenging puzzles with this new relaxing and fun FREE match-3 game!
This project flowed almost identically to Lily's Garden, in terms of production and what I did for the game. It was the former project that I jumped onto first. Around March of 2021, I moved from Penny and Flo, onto Lily's Garden.
The game is available on the iOS app store, Google Play, and the Amazon Appstore.
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Leapfrog Academy
Throughout the time I've spent working under the company name Strawdog Studios (before adopting their current name - Tactile Games UK), I exclusively worked with Leapfrog to conceptualise, design and create mini-games for their Leapfrog Academy mobile and desktop application. Whilst working with them, we've created over 2000 educational mini-games for children aged 3-6 years old.
These games range from side scrolling games, to mini golf games. Being the only designer at Strawdog working on these particular games, I worked very closely with our technical director, and the producers at Leapfrog to make decisions on our design approach for them. I then documented the fundamentals of the game in design documents; from how educational elements were integrated into the mini games, to the IP's Leapfrog owned that would be used.
During the later phases of development with Leapfrog, they asked for us to think of some cute, friendly and funny IP designs that were to be used as a focal point of the mini games we would be producing. So i went away and produced some sketches and concepts (unfortunately, due to policies the client wishes to uphold, i am unable to show any concept imagery). The character designs i'd put together, Leapfrog were keen to use. Which were eventually given the titles 'Bubble Buccaneers' and 'Candy Cavers' (pictured below - final art produced by an artist at Tactile Games UK).
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