I work where art and engineering grind against each other.

Technical art, in my hands, is mostly diagnosis. I look for the place in a production where the artists and the engine are fighting — a step that has to be repeated by hand, an asset that only imports correctly if you remember three unwritten rules, an effect that looks right in the scene view and falls apart on a device — and I remove that friction. The fix is whatever the problem actually needs: an editor tool, a convention, a shader, a VFX or UI setup, or a pass through the profiler.

I have done this in two very different rooms. One is a studio's live production: at Vertigo Games, Technical Artist on Critical Strike, then day-to-day technical art ownership on Polygun Arena — supporting other people's art inside an existing pipeline, on shipped mobile titles with real players and a release cadence that does not pause for a refactor. The other is ownership: EONEvolve is the studio I co-founded, where I build the pipeline and then have to live in it, because every shortcut I take becomes my own maintenance a month later.

That second room taught me the habit I lean on hardest. When something breaks once, I fix it. When it breaks twice, I stop and ask what convention would have prevented it, then build the small tool that makes the convention the path of least resistance. A one-off fix is paid for once and expires; an artist-facing convention plus a tool keeps paying on every content drop, every new asset, every build. It also means I care how a tool feels to the artist using it — a workflow people route around is not a workflow.

Almost all of that work has been on mobile, and I treat mobile limits as a design input rather than a cleanup pass at the end. Draw calls, overdraw, texture memory and shader complexity decide what an effect is allowed to be, so the cheapest moment to have that conversation is while the look is still being defined — not after the art is final and the only remaining option is to delete something. Profiling early usually protects the visual intent instead of cutting it.

I am open to Technical Artist roles and collaborations — the direct line is iberkanisk@gmail.com.