Lighting Artist Portfolio - The Walking Dead: The Final Season
With the shuttering of Telltale Games, I was at a crossroads in regards to my career path. With only two years of lighting experience, companies were not banging down my door to hire me. At the time of the closure, I was ramping up art pre-production for Wolf Among Us 2. I had helped on the Stranger Things game to get used to the Unity engine before transferring over to the Wolf2 team as the lighting lead. We were switching to Unity with a custom toolset that included many of the lighting features we used in The Tool (say what you about the engine, the lighting system was way ahead in regards to light management than any engine Ive used since). Then the end came.
Interviewing with other studios, the scenario played out as follows:
My experience as solo lighting artist on a game (basically a lead) allowed the hiring teams to consider me for a senior role. Given they were often looking for both positions, lighting artist and senior lighting artist, my application would be "upgraded" to the senior lighting artist. Then I would interview with a member, or two, of the art teams and they'd be skeptical given my two years of experience (with only The Tool as my dev engine) and would pass on me. It was frustrating and humbling. I was at a point where I'd even take on a Junior Lighting Artist role just to get more experience with a new engine!
After a month of reflecting whether to stay in game dev industry or go back to film production, I got an email from Brodie Anderson (producer of the The Walking Dead team from Telltale Games). He was inquiring if I'd be interested in handling the lighting for the rest of The Walking Dead: The Final Season since Skybound Games was moving forward with finishing it (two episodes, of the four episode season, had been released when Telltale Games shut down). Thankful to be earning a paycheck again (at least for a short while), I said, "hell yes!"
That's how I joined the Still Not Bitten team - the final holdouts of the Telltale era.
The Walking Dead: The Final Season, so far, has been one of my best experiences working as a game dev. We were a small team working out of the old Telltale offices. The game is probably the best looking thing Telltale had ever produced. We had streamlined the engine enough to allow for dynamic lighting (no more baked lightmaps), as well as, many other material/vfx improvements. Since we were no longer publishing on every platform imaginable, the game wasn't as visually restricted for performance as past projects. The Nintendo Switch was the most limited platform but even that was still powerful enough to run our dynamic lighting rigs.
