PLAYDOTS
Acquired by Take-Two Interactive and Zynga as a part of Take-Two Mobile.
Art Lead, PlayDots (New Games Team)
June 2022 - Present
Visual Designer, PlayDots (New Games Team)
October 2019 - June 2022
OVERVIEW
Positioned uniquely in the heart of the Meatpacking District as one of NYC's few gaming studios, PlayDots consisted of an "eclectic mix of illustrators, musicians, animators, designers, and engineers that believe everyone can enjoy a great game", with hit free-to-play releases such as Dots, Two Dots, and Dots & Co. As part of the New Games team, we sought to create well designed, easy to approach, and stimulating casual games that were also competitive and profitable top hits in the current mobile game market.
GARDEN TAILS
Garden Tails was the first and largest property that I worked on while at PlayDots, a project I inherited already several years in development by the time I joined the company. For the next few years alongside a small but dynamic team, I had the opportunity to oversee the game's growth all the way to its release across multiple devices through Apple Arcade.
The game had several phases of development coupled with several shifts in team and resourcing. As a result, we went through many different approaches before landing on its final direction. Through UI/UX and other 2D visual contributions, alongside close collaboration with our Game Design, 3D, and Engineering teams, I helped determine and unify the final visual direction that the game ultimately shipped with.
CREDITS
For a full list of credits, please download Garden Tails and view the credits screen.
Game Director
Grant Reid
Art Director
Kati Nawrocki
New Games Management
Tim Sherman
Production Director
David Trammell
Apple Arcade Game Lead
Sandra Honigman
Lead Engineer and Architect
Ra’ad Aldalaq
3D Art and Animation Lead
Ashley Farlow
Junior 3D Artist
Sophia Zapata
Senior Visual Designer
Austin Roesberg
Visual Design
Alicia Feng, Ben Rudlin
Illustration
Alicia Feng
Technical Artist
Shirley Huang
Concept Art
Kati Nawrocki
Senior Game Designers
Kris Horowitz, Toby Sarnelle
Composer/Sound Design
Ross Wariner, Cody Uhler
DREAM SOLITAIRE
The New Games team iterated on a wide variety of game concepts during my time with Dots, ranging from letter matching to pixel art jigsaws to city builders. One of the more fleshed out explorations that we wanted to pursue was a dream kingdom-themed solitaire game which I had the opportunity to conceptualize and design early visuals for over the course of a few weeks.
Working closely with a small handful of people including our co-founder, I helped create a functional prototype featuring a full saga map with hundreds of levels, a complete set of game pieces and accompanying mechanics, a shop hub to purchase powerups, and much more for our testing needs.
Solitaire also served as the important foundation for an internal global UI kit I also had the pleasure to create, used several times for the rapid prototyping of other game ideas.
NEW GAMES: PITCHES & PROTOTYPES
We had many ongoing projects at Dots to test ideas both in and outside of our immediate Match-3 puzzle space, and I contributed a lot of work to enable these explorations. This included several visual direction decks, icons, UI assets, prototypes, flows, and illustrations.
As mentioned through Solitaire, I created an internal global UI kit that was utilized by various different teams to more quickly put together better looking prototypes for game ideas that didn’t necessarily have a set visual direction yet. Because of its dynamic nature, it could be easily edited by anyone, and elements could be adjusted effectively in things like color, size, type, and style to better suit the game as it matured.
For more specifics about each individual project (Global UI Kit, Fashion & Fame/Fashion Merge, Kingdom Merge, Match Box, etc.), please reach out to me at tocorviday@gmail.com.
