About

HoverDrive was a team project I worked on during my Junior year of college at DigiPen Institute of Technology. I served as Art Director and chose the thematic direction of the game, being warriors on hoverbikes fighting in an arena on a distant planet, collecting upgrades to your vehicle once you vanquish foes. I also created 3 of the playable chracters as seen below. I held weekly art and team meetings where we discussed the progress of the game making sure we could hit milestones. Unfortunatley, during this project Covid Hit and the programmers and designers where unable to use the schools computer labs to play test and iterate on the game - it was a networking multiplayer game, so they needed players and computers to test it; So our professors let us ship it as a single player experience where you can race around the arena and shoot enemies - seen in the gameplay above.

 

This project was created in Unreal Engine 5. The characters where created using box-modelling in Maya, where they were also rigged in tandum with another artist who was creating the hover bikes. I chose to do box-modeling for these characters to save some time as I had to do 3 characters in 4 months, along with my other classes and team duties. I added all the details in their textures created in Substance Painter.  Their concepts were painted in Photoshop, while inital sketches were done on printer paper with a graphite pencil.

 

In Unreal Engine I utilized tools such as set dressing to organize and make the environment feel alive. I used animation graphs to create seemless transitions between animations in the prototype. I also imported textures and materials along with the characters, rigs, and animations. On this project we utilized GitHub for file sharing and backups.

Big Mike

Wireframe

Textures

Turnaround

Concepts

Renders

Texan Tornado

Wireframe

Textures

Turnaround

Concepts

Renders