One of the cool perks I personally enjoyed while working at Visual Concepts for the four years that I did get to work there was how much they were willing to give us the chance to try and work on stuff a little outside our traditional roles. Like for example you can see some of the court designs I got to do in my main portfolio but I wanted to use this blog post as a chance to show off some of the other work that I got to do that I'd consider a little more miscellaneous.
To start I got assigned to make 10 murals for the MyCourt. For context MyCourt is a game mode that allows the players to invite other players online for private matches but more importantly for this blog post. It also allows players to unlock different banners, murals, and many other items to decorate their own MyCourt with. I had started a little on the first two but it was on the side of other work I was already doing at the time. Then I was told actually we need to wrap these up in about 2 weeks. It was a miss-communication from some of our other teams, but It was the tail end of crunch and everything was winding down so I'm sure they had a lot of other plates spinning and it probably just got lost in the shuffle how important these tasks actually were.
This first one is for Donovan Mitchel aka Spida. I had done most of the line art for this one by the time the deadline bomb had dropped on me. I rushed the render a bit and would of loved a little more time to really polish this one up way more but for the time frame I got to work on this one I'm pretty proud of how it came out.
This one was the other one that I had started before I knew the actual deadline. I had the sketch done for this one but I really wanted to push myself to complete it because I loved the idea for this one too. So honestly for these first two I did really crunch on them and had to make a few compromises because I just wanted to see these through. All that being said I'm happy with how these two turned out plus I just had a lot of fun making them as well.This one is of Kevin Garnett and his famous quote, "Anything is Possible."
This is how they are displayed in the game. Unfortunately I don't have the other back wall to show off and also this was before someone had pushed a fix for this mural wall because as you can tell it is being slightly squashed in the 3D render.
This one for example was a little more closer to how the other 8 were handled. Unfortunately due to me getting laid off I don't have the others that I had made but fortunately I think this one was one of the stronger pieces anyways. This one was for Giannis Antetokounmpo aka the Greek Freak.
I had to be creative because the deadlines were so tight. I'd would really have to push myself pretty hardcore to draw something like this in a more traditional sense, so I opted to do the smart thing and utilize blender to make a sweet render then use assets of the athlete's we already had. it took me a little over a work day to do one of these. I would be about 90 percent of the way done with one of these by the end of a work day then I'd do a little more polishing the next morning, export, and then do everything that was needed to get it into the game. Mind you that these were all started from nothing other than the prompt I had, "hey we need a mural of X athlete." I could of for sure just done them all in the same style, but I challenged myself to make each mural unique. Plus I just had faith in myself to do that in the timeline I had to wrap up the rest of them. For example I did one for Wilt Chamberlain and I made a collage of a bunch of his jerseys because we just had a bunch of renders of them in our depot.
Here are also 3 other logos/graphics that I designed for the game. Really this sort of logo/design work felt pretty foreign to me because I never really had any interest in doing this sort of work before and it's a little opposite of how I traditionally want to approach my own personal work. Regardless I really learned to love it and honestly wouldn't mind exploring more graphic design and even motion design work going forward. Plus getting the chance to do work like this was always a nice break from the typical 3D work that my job entailed.
Also I got the chance to design clothing as well. Unfortunately this is the only one I was able to save. These were unlock-able pieces of clothing a player would unlock by playing and completing limited timed events in the online part of the MyCareer mode. At the time I don't quite remember why but I had to also wrap these ones up quickly as well because another fire came up and I specifically was the one with the most knowledge of how to fix it. It was more than likely something to do with UI, because I volunteered to help out with that team a lot. I got the chance to make quite a bit more clothing but unfortunately I can't show them off because I only have shots of them in the debug mode and I'm unable to share those images. I know for a fact the spray can was put on a shirt at the very least.
All in all we were always on and off with tight deadlines, but honestly I personally think my brain works pretty well with a fire under my behind. Although at the time I was always a little down on myself for a lot of these pieces, because in the moment all I could think of is how I could of made these all look better if I just had more time. With the benefit of hindsight and considering all the other factors that went into making these I'm proud of this work regardless.
To also address the elephant in the room and because I mentioned it a couple of times. I was laid off in late 2023, and it saddens me to see the continued layoffs that are continuing to happen at the Austin office as well as the rest of our industry as well going into the new year. We had an awesome team of talented folks and I'm sure everyone will land on there feet including myself eventually. The job market is just a little rough out there right now to say the least. Anyways I'm very proud of my time with the company. I joined Hookbang in late 2019 when they were a small company of like 15ish employees and we got acquired by Visual Concepts to grow to about 80 plus people. Most of the growth was during Covid so it really hit me that, "Wow I actually made it." When we finally started going back into the office. We really moved up from a small open space office that was pretty cramped to then having my own personal office in the domain. (which for context is like a giant outdoor mall that is like the pseudo downtown area for north Austin.) I felt like even though we were growing so fast we never really lost our original culture, so it still felt like we were still that small little company for the longest time.
Anyways expect a few other blog posts dropping as I try to drop some other miscellaneous 2K work I managed to save and I'm cooking 2 other projects that I want to document on here as well.
Cheers,
Danny Tamez
