About Me

Hi! My name’s Frost, I’m a generalist 3D artist that specialises in technical, lighting, and environmental work, although I’m very flexible and am always looking for opportunities to expand my skills and experience. I have an undergrad degree in games programming and a masters in game art. Through these I discovered I found teaching incredibly satisfying and rewarding, and spent a notable portion of my time rewording and re-explaining lectures, providing constructive feedback, and volunteering to help teach in undergrad lectures through my masters.

I’m currently working part time as an environment and lighting artist for Octoghost Studio, but would be interested in further part time work, preferably where I can have the opportunity to teach more in an Assistant Lecturer or Mentor style role.

My Path To Art

My background and path up till now has been pretty… non-traditional. During my undergrad I was on a BSc Computing For Games course, basically programming for video games, so my bachelors is in programming, but our course was very focused on actually developing games as multidisciplinary teams, so for almost all of it I was actually acting as a producer, and now I’m an artist! I should probably explain that a little more.
So I fell into production, in my first year my team and I we were fairly directionless, and it became clear that we wouldn’t actually get much done without someone helping to steer and organise the team, so I stepped up while still doing some programming on our project. Then as I moved into second and third year the core team stayed together, and I was enjoying it and the team found it a boon so I stayed as a producer. I was always trying to push my skills and knowledge, doing a lot of reading and watching talks, and in my third year this drive led me to learning more about art production. Being a good producer meant I needed an understanding of everything that goes into a game, so getting a handle on the basics of game art and having experience using their pipelines, rather than just knowing them in theory, would allow me to better empathise with artists and better understand what a given task would actually involve. To this end I started learning both 2D and 3D, started going to life drawing and looking at learning resources, and asking our artists to run me through their process as they worked, which they very kindly did.
That’s when it started to click for me. While I’d always admired an artists skill, growing up my education had always been very STEM focused. So here I was, taking a serious look into art as a career for practically the first time, and I had this moment of “Oh gosh. Oh I really like this”, which was then closely followed by “Oh no… I might want to do this more than production”, which considering my plan had been to start applying for roles imminently, was a consequential thought. So, I put that specific thought aside for the time being and kept learning and practising to ‘improve my production skills’, which it did do, and definitely not because I was just getting more and more into game art. Nope, definitely not. Then, after graduating and spending some time reflecting, I decided to take the plunge and applied for the Game Art masters that I’m now on, and from there it’s been a lot of hard work, but it has been so good and so worth it.

And that brings us to now, where I’m an artist with a strong technical background, who picks up software, technical aspects, and workflows really quickly, and who works well with and can understand the perspective of multiple different disciplines. I’m actively working on filling in the gaps in my knowledge, improving my artistic eye and understanding, through practice but also through consulting with peers and staff, and attending undergrad lectures and workshops alongside my masters studies. In 5 months I feel like I’ve gone from barely keeping my head above water, to starting to get steady and get my feet under me, and it’s a great and really exciting feeling. I’m really excited for my future role in the games industry, getting to work alongside other artists and continue to learn and grow, so if you have a role or a studio you think I would be interested in, or you’d be interested in talking more and maybe hiring me, please don’t hesitate to reach out! I’m primarily interested in Environment Art roles, but also have an interest in Technical Art or Material Art roles, so I’d be happy to chat about any of these.

Skills

Production

I am experienced with Jira and Trello, having used them for task tracking over the last three years. Jira is awesome, the automation is a blessing, and story points are excellent for allowing planning with evidence that you can point to, rather than just experience and vibes. This has been essential for reassuring scope concerns that have come from our supervisors, and allowing us to intelligently and continuously adjust the scope of the project as needed. This practice has already highlighted potential scoping problems within the initial plans for our latest project. As we could foresee this early, we’ve been able to adjust scope and replan, rather than finding out we had over scoped late in the project and having to cut half finished assets. I talk about this in a little more in my second paragraph here.

I’ve also made use of story tags to help with sprint planning and ensuring even workload across the team, first on Trello and now within Jira. This, combined with custom board filters using ScriptRunner has made it really easy for developers on the team to quickly find tasks relating to any discipline.

I have experience doing release planning, assisted by Jira’s version reports. This has an excellent tool, allowing us to see at a glance if we’re on track, as well as providing an easy and clear way to communicate this. I’ve also made use of different release versions to help with story prioritisation.

I have also begun experimenting with Continuous Development pipelines using Github Actions and GameCI. I’ve set up our latest pipeline so that a pull request is automatically created every night at midnight, which then triggers automated running of unit tests. If these pass the project is then built and uploaded to Steam, so it is immediately available on a “Daily Builds” branch on Steam. I am also writing my dissertation on the effectiveness of Continuous Development pipelines within university level teams. This is currently a work in progress, but I would be happy to provide a link upon request.

I am familiar with Confluence for documentation, having switched to it after previously using collections of Google Docs. This has been a good improvement as documentation can be ordered and can reference each other, rather than having a large collection of separate documents that all have to be self contained. This lets each document be much shorter and to the point, significantly increasing readability.

In 2020 I started my own company, Glass Nomad Games, to publish games through Steam. We’ve been running the company Twitter in order to advertise our games before release and build a small following to improve the amount of traction we get upon release. I have handled all of the legal research, registering the company and setting up a business bank account, as well as handling IP agreements with the development team.