Vertigo Games - Production Technical Art

Overview

Production technical art on live mobile shooters. The work covers tooling and live-ops automation, production VFX, character animation setup, UI and HUD implementation, and mobile optimization - all on titles that are already live and shipping content on a schedule.

Most of the value sits in the seams between disciplines. The day-to-day is working across art, design, engineering and QA: turning what 2D and 3D artists produce into something the engine can consume, making sure design's content plans are actually buildable at the required cadence, and handing QA content that is complete and testable rather than half-wired.

Production Tooling & Live-Ops Automation

Assembling a live-ops content drop was a manual, multi-step editor process, which made it slow and easy to get subtly wrong.

The fix had two halves, and the first half was not code. Together with the 2D art team we agreed on a standardized asset template and naming convention, so every incoming content pack had a predictable shape. On top of that convention I built a suite of Unity Editor tools covering several live-ops workflows, each consuming the standardized export and taking that workflow as far toward a QA-ready content drop as it could.

Partnering with 2D art on the template and naming is what made automation possible at all. A tool that has to guess at inconsistent input can only ever be a partial solution; once the input convention was fixed, the tool could be strict, and strictness is what makes the validation pass meaningful.

Workflow Components

These are the pieces the tooling covers. Coverage varied by workflow - some were automated end to end, others only in part, with the rest still done by hand.

Covered Workflows

• Event offers
• Seasonal draws
• Lucky draws
• Inbox
• Battle pass
• Equipment

Workflow Shape

[Standardized art export]  ->  naming + template convention (agreed with 2D art)
        |
        v
[Editor tooling]  --> ScriptableObject setup
               --> prefab generation & setup
               --> Addressables groups + labels
               --> localization entries
               --> validation pass
                            |
                            v
              [QA handoff-ready content drop]

Production VFX

VFX work across 20+ weapons, grenades, tactical items and equipment pieces. In a competitive mobile shooter, effects are read at speed on a small screen, so two constraints shape every decision: readability and cost.

Readability comes first because combat VFX is information. A muzzle flash, an explosion or an ability tell tells the player what just happened and where; if the effect is beautiful but ambiguous, it has failed. Cost is the second constraint - overdraw and particle counts are the budget that gets spent fastest on mobile, so effects are built to hit the read with as little screen coverage and as few simultaneous particles as the shot allows.

• Arsenal presentation
• In-game idle, deploy, reload and inspect
• Fire animation FX
• Ability FX
• Explosions

Built with Unity Particle System, Shader Graph, Amplify Shader Editor and Blender.

Character Upgrade Animation Setup

Audited Polygun Arena's character roster and reworked the animation setup where it needed it: rebuilding animator setups, retiming existing animations so they read correctly in play, and synchronizing character-specific VFX to the animation so effects land on the beat they are supposed to land on.

This was done in collaboration with the animation discipline - the animators own the motion, and the technical art side owns how that motion is wired, timed and connected to everything else in the character.

UI & HUD

Production UI and HUD implementation, including responsive layouts that hold up across the range of device sizes the games ship on. This also covered live-ops interfaces - the screens that the content pipeline above ultimately feeds - and Spine-driven UI animation.

Mobile Optimization

Ongoing optimization work on live titles: sprite-atlas restructuring, particle budgeting, graphics-quality scaling, and production asset cleanup, with validation on mid-tier devices rather than only on high-end hardware.

No performance figures are quoted here. Gains on a live title depend on the build, the device and the scene being measured, and internal profiling data is not something I can publish - so this section describes the work, not numbers.

Collaboration & Production Impact

The through-line across all of the above is cross-functional work. The content tooling only existed because 2D art agreed to a shared template and naming convention. The character work only landed because the animation discipline and technical art were solving it together. The output of the pipeline was shaped by what engineering needed downstream and by what QA needed in order to actually test a drop.

That is where a technical artist's leverage comes from: not from any single asset, but from removing the friction between disciplines so that everyone else's work moves faster and breaks less.

Credits & Confidentiality

Technical Artist work at Vertigo Games on Critical Strike and Polygun Arena. Internal tooling, source code, unreleased assets, screenshots and project structure are confidential and are deliberately omitted. The workflow diagram on this page is an original, generic recreation made for this portfolio.

Happy to talk through the reasoning, trade-offs and decisions behind any of this in an interview, within the limits of the NDA.