PLAYDOTS
Acquired by Take-Two Interactive and Zynga as a part of Take-Two Mobile.
Art Lead, PlayDots (New Games Team)
June 2022 - March 2023
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.
Tools: Unity, Sketch, Figma, Principle, Adobe Creative Suite, Atlassian Suite, Github, Slack
GARDEN TAILS
Garden Tails is a Match-3 mobile game that invites players to complete a series of puzzles to create luscious, beautiful 3D gardens for their cuddly animal pals. As players complete each level, various animals - such as bunnies, dears, and foxes - will pop up in the garden, revealing their playful, unique stories. Take a break, sit back and start growing your garden one puzzle at a time.
Garden Tails was the first and largest property that I worked on while at PlayDots, a project I inherited that was stuck perpetually in development when 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 tested many different approaches and iterations before landing on its final direction. Through UI/UX and several 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.
Garden Tails proved to be highly retentive and financially successful, beating internal forecasts by over 10% and operating at 70%+ margins in 2022. Had the studio continued operations, based on our numbers, New Games would have continued profitably well into 2023, as our collective efforts were successful in creating a beautiful and engaging experience players were willing to come back to every day.
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
Additional Unity Assistance
Hao Fan
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.
> ARTSTATION WALKTHROUGH
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 worked very hard to enable these explorations. I created several visual direction decks, icons, UI assets, prototypes, flows, and illustrations to help streamline the development of each game’s vision.
As mentioned with Dream Solitaire, I created an internal global UI kit, one that was dynamically utilized by various different teams to more quickly put together better looking prototypes for game ideas that did not have a set visual direction yet. Because of how it was structured and componentized in Sketch, the library and its parts could be easily adjusted by anyone, and elements could be tweaked effectively for properties such as color, size, type, and style to better suit the prototype 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.
A small portion of components I created for the Universal UI Kit Library in Sketch. Symbols could be easily swapped for other states and colorways, and could be dynamically sized and reordered to a game designer's liking. Individual components were also ported into Unity so engineers could utilize the kit as well.
A set of universal vector icons I created in Sketch for the kit, attempting to cover common icons and several icon states that appeared across all our games.
Slides from an art direction pitch deck I created for "Fashion Merge", the last major game the Studio was working on before dissolution. Through this deck I shared with the team my desire to theme the game and its interface around major trending fashion styles at the time, highlighting notable features of each style and how they could potentially translate as game elements.
A series of select merge tile concepts I drew for Fashion Merge. These were used to set the standard and direct a third-party company we contracted to help fulfill the large quantity of gameplay pieces we needed for the game. Because of the tight nature of our timeline and budget, I created dozens of these icons (and more) within a of week.
A series of select building spawners I illustrated for a different untitled merge game concept, themed around crafting materials and resource management.
Internal game concept exercise about cooking. Created several possible concepts for a "stern but caring" Mentor Chef character, as well as two directions the game could be pulled (depicted via themed splash screens).
A mechanic tile overhaul I did for the game Matchbox, a color-matching puzzle game. All assets were SVGs that could be dynamically sized, created directly in Sketch.
A series of motion prototypes I did for a word game called Letter Flip, testing various interactions (word clear, flower pot mechanic/level win, tile hint and active mechanic states) and gameplay flows. Prototypes were made using Principle.