Art Outsourcing Manager
2K Games Austin

(Public Company; TTWO; Computer Games industry)

September 2008 — October 2009 (1 year 2 months)

• Worked on a very small incubator team that was developing a pre-production prototype for an MMO strategy title.

• I joined the team to develop a robust art outsourcing pipeline from the ground up to prepare to outsource up to 80% of the game’s total art assets, to find and test outsourcing vendors, selected an art studio to develop a great deal of concept art (everything from avatar characters to ground units to different cultures’ architecture to large, splashy marketing pieces), to work with the art director to develop a unique art style, cast a dragnet across various art schools and online forums to find and hire an art intern which I then brought aboard and helped manage, and also created art myself where needed.

• In addition to the management and direction aspects of my role, over the course of the project I also designed a fully functional and robust morph target \ wire parameter-driven fully customizable player avatar creation system based in 3DSMAX, developed the overall design of the city layouts throughout the various ages of history, designed a fully modular and customizable system of player throne rooms they can outfit with items they win or buy in the game, modeled, textured, rigged and facial-rigged characters, and created a series of low polygon highly optimized building models with a small set of textures that can be reused across that nation’s entire series of buildings appropriate to that age.