Some hired work from the 2011 - graphics and mockups for tablet games

Back in 2011, I had the pleasure of signing up for a part time job with Cogworks studios  -as artist/animator . I made graphics and mockups for a bunch of iOS games/Apps. There was an opportunity to go full time, however I was in the middle of my second year at the University of Bradford - there were a lot of assignments stopping me from doing that. Also UK students are not allowed to work for more than 20 hours per week.


We used toggl to track my time each month. Sadly university took a lot of it and as you can see from one of my reports- I wasnt able to spend too much on concepts.

There was of course a non disclosure agreement with the job. Those type of agreements usually have a period of time - in this case 3 years - in which I am not allowed to release any information or show any of my work publicly. Well since 4 years passed I said to myself - What the heck, Let's do it. I am going to share with you some of the more fun ones. :)

Please note that some of these were quickly made sprites - used to put together a prototype for a few games. They were in no shape or form the final product. The names I am giving the games are not the final product names.

One of the projects was to do a game in a frame concept for Team 17. The deadline was very tight, so it's not very polished. I am not going to go into detail about the game ideas or design, since none of that was my work.

There was another ongoing project for a Jenga-like game where you stock blocks ontop of each other. I made a title screen, two backgrounds and animated sprites for the blocks. Each block had a face with a different character. Doing the backgrounds was really fun, since they were vertically very tall. We had a level where you stack blocks all the way into space, another one which started deep underwater and kept going until reaching the surface and so on. I had to use illustrator on that one, since it had better export tools.

There was a Bird in a factory game project where I made a number of bird concepts for. Then when we picked one of them - I made a fully playable animated sprite for the bird- run, idle, death, etc.
Some of the background elements also had to be animated - smoke, saw, travolator, etc etc. Those were simple enough to just do in Inkskape. I had set up for myself a script in linux that exports the svg layers as an image sequence. And another one which makes a gif file from the image sequence  (for presentation purposes). That saved a lot of time.

 I made an entire spritesheet in inkscape. There was no premade concept art, but the guys at Cogworks gave me some direction as to what animations they are going to need and some of the specific gameplay event items. I had some creative freedom in coming up with various hazards for the little bird though.

Overall these were fun projects for me and working with Cogworks was a real pleasure!
I do hope that they get to complete/release some of these games some day. Looking at my work from 4 years ago, I can't say that I am completely pleased with it. Surely it can do with a lot more polish! If these games ever get on production schedule, I would be more than happy to work on them full time.