Punk Rock Exorcist - Art Lead

This was our capstone game project at FIEA: a punk horror beat-em-up where you fight off demons using guitar-powered exorcisms. I served as the Art Lead, but also handled a lot of the technical art responsibilities, especially anything procedural or shader-related.

We wanted the game to feel like a living comic book. Raw, expressive, chaotic. That meant designing tools to help the team move fast without sacrificing style. I built a procedural level crowd system in Houdini, a custom cell-shaded outline and shadow shader in Unreal, and an asset conditioning pipeline to keep things structured and working across source control.

A lot of the tech art in this game came from necessity. The team was small (only 5 artists, including myself). The pipeline was fragile. So I made systems to keep us sane, from UV cleanup and LOD generation tools to a custom rigging setup for our 4-armed boss character Jemorgan (an 80s demonic music exec). Everything had to work in-game, but also be artist-friendly, we weren’t shipping tools just to ship tools.

One thing I’m proud of is how many parts of the game used my tools without needing hand-holding. That was a goal from the beginning: tech that gets out of the way. If we had more time, I would’ve loved to collect more structured feedback from the artists who used it, but in production, it quietly did its job.

The result wasn’t just a playable game, it was a functioning, artist-tested pipeline that let the team be loud, fast, and messy... without breaking things.