Emmanuel Valdez

Released: 2023

Publisher: 2K

Platforms: Nintendo Switch, Sony Playstation 5, Xbox Series X, PC, Sony PlayStation 4, Xbox One

My Role: Art Director

Developing and releasing LEGO 2K Drive was an incredible experience, filled with artistic and technical challenges, as we aimed to deliver a game that would captivate millions of LEGO fans worldwide. This open-world, action-driving game features a diverse array of driving themes, activities, challenges, missions, and races.

Our art direction goal was to provide a true LEGO experience, allowing players to drive through a vibrant, dynamic world designed for high-speed adventures across various fantastical biomes. The world is populated with LEGO-built props, foliage, and buildings, all of which can be recreated in real life using existing LEGO bricks and elements. Each LEGO assembly and build adheres to the standards of real LEGO constructions, ensuring stability and legitimacy according to LEGO connectivity standards. Most of the LEGO-built objects in the game are original designs created by our team, with some official LEGO creations included.

The vehicles are the stars of the game, featuring a mix of original designs and official LEGO sets, primarily from the Speed Champions and City themes. One of the most exciting aspects of creating the vehicles was meeting and receiving training from a designer on the Speed Champions team. We also enlisted the help of a master builder to craft and design some of the ambient vehicles themed to the different biomes.

Released: 1999

Publisher: Midway Home Entertainment, Inc.

Platforms: Sega Dreamcast, Sony Playstation (PSOne), Nintendo N64, Nintendo Gameboy Advance, Nintendo Gameboy Color

My Role: Lead Artist, Game Director

As the Lead Artist I had the responsibility to lead a small, but superbly talented team to build a fighting game to compete with established and popular franchises from Namco and Capcom.  We also had additional time pressure with a compressed development schedule of 11 months in order to hit the launch of the Sega Dreamcast.   The team had just come off of a cancelled arcade fighting game and were motivated to develop a game that would entertain and compete with the best games of the time.

Our goal was to make a simple but fun, arcade style fighting game.  Humor was going to be a big part of how we plan to disrupt the fighting game genre.  We also focused on designing characters that represented a broad range of charming personalities and attitudes.  By aiming for a “hyper-realistic” look we designed the characters to have cartoony and whimsical proportions and used realistic textures like skin and materials like cloth.  The result was a unique look that gave birth to superstar characters Afro Thunder and would be remembered for bringing personality and emotion to videogame characters.  After the game was released, our team received an email from Ang Lee’s production company which stated that the Ready 2 Rumble Boxing characters were an inspiration for the design of the Hulk in his movie.

By choosing boxing we were limited to a smaller set of animations than a standard fighting game.  We targeted fast, responsive controls so the animations had to run at 60fps.  Using motion capture and Filmbox (now called MotionBuilder) we were able to manipulate the data captured and directed in our in-house mocap studio and easily re-target the data on an assorted variety of body types and designs.  With only three animators on the entire project (including myself) we generated hundreds of unique and shared attacks, reactions, intros, outros, and over-the-top special moves. 

The game was ground breaking with the design and presentation of the characters, the intuitive and addicting gameplay, and the entertaining humor.  Ready 2 Rumble Boxing was a launch title on the Sega Dreamcast and was the most successful third party game for many years.  It became an entertainment phenomenon and was used in movies such as “Showtime” starring Eddie Murphy and Robert De Niro, “Head of State” starring Chris Rock, and “Baby Boy” directed by John Singleton.   The game also appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno in a segment where we made a Ready 2 Rumble Boxing style Jay Leno boxer who was magically transported into the game to fight Afro Thunder.

Released: 2000

Publisher: Midway Home Entertainment, Inc.

Platforms: Playstation 2, Sega Dreamcast, PSOne, Nintendo N64, Nintendo Gameboy Color

My role: Game Director and Lead Artist

This sequel was released in time for the launch of the Playstation 2.  The team size grew but the deadlines were even more compressed.  The challenge here was to develop visuals that would take advantage of the then new and powerful Playstation 2 hardware.  We were able to smooth and sculpt out more details on the character models with the higher polygon count which also allowed the team to build enough tessellation for flowing clothing and accessories.  We utilized more complex shaders and lighting models for a richer, and more vibrant look.  We added motion blur which gave the animations a more life-like appearance and took advantage of the PS2's horsepower to generate more particle effects enhancing the brutal reactions and special moves.

We were able to generate even more animations than the first game by sharing more animations and using MotionBuilder to re-target animations on other characters with more exaggerated limbs and body types.   We increased the number of boxers and designed a larger range of character heights and weights.  We added more variations in the animation list for taunts, intros, and outros to show off even more personality and attitude for each character.

To add to the wackiness of the roster of characters, celebrities were introduced into the franchise including The King of Pop, the late Michael Jackson, and NBA Hall of Famer, Shaquille O’Neal.  Ring announcer Michael Buffer made an appearance as a Boss character, Rumbleman.  There were even political spoof boxers, a former US President and his First Lady.

Released: 2005

Published by Capcom (North America), Ubisoft (Europe)

Platforms: Playstation 2, Microsoft Xbox

My Role: Co-Creator, Chief Creative Officer

Darkwatch was the first game developed internally at the newly establish High Moon Studios.  Along with my duties as Chief Creative Officer to established the art, game design, audio, and motion capture departments, I help create the original concept for the game along with Chris Ulm, Farzad Varahramyan, and Paul O’Connor.  The goal was develop a first person shooter based on an original intellectual property.  Darkwatch was conceived as a mashup of Westerns and Vampire themes.  

The art vision was centered on establishing a new world that took themes and elements from the Old West and combine them with a gothic and horror setting.  The game revolved around the Darkwatch organization, a secret society that has protected mankind for thousand of years against evil.  A visual DNA was established to highlight the uniqueness of the Darkwwatch’s weaponry, gear, and vehicles.  The User Interface was designed around the Darkwatch organization theme and style with bladed, metal overtones.  The enemies were designed around classic Old West villians such as banditos, gunslingers, and outlaws but with a vampiric or undead prominence.  

The in-game character animations and movies were a combination of motion capture and hand animation.  There were several different set of movie types: in-game gameplay setups, pre-rendered interstitials using in-game assets, and high fidelity pre-rendered movies using hi-res art assets built especially for these movies.  Each had their own unique set of challenges.  I personally directed the in-game gameplay setup movies working along side the game design team.  I collaborated closely with the cinematic group, game director, and creative visual director for the trailer.  We were honored to have the opening movie directed and created by Kyle Cooper and Prologue. 

The finished result was a testament to the talented work of many artists, game designers, and programmers that developed a unique and entertaining first person shooter experience.

Released: 2008

Publisher: Sierra/ Activision

Platforms: Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft Xbox360

My Role: Game Director, Co-Fight Choreographer

The Bourne Conspiracy is the only videogame ever developed based on the famous Jason Bourne character.  It was High Moon Studios' first licensed game and the first third person action game to be developed at the studio.  We chose to develop the game using an early version of Unreal Engine 3.  It’s always a challenge when the technology and tools are so new to develop such an ambitious game.  The game has several distinctively different modes of play: fighting, shooting, and driving.   Each had it’s own set of challenges to make the experience cohesive artistically and stylistically.

I was personally involved in the fighting feature of the game because of my experience and background in the fighting game genre.   I reached out to the Bourne movie fight designer and consultant, Jeff Imada.  We collaborated on the style and execution of the many fight scenarios from one-on-one fights to multi-person showdowns.  Takedowns and weaponizing the environment and elements around the player became a key feature that made the experience of the player becoming Bourne.  We motion captured at our studio using Jeff’s troop of stunt performers including Matt Damon’s training partner from the Bourne movies, John Eusebio.   The result of the work was a fight experience unique to the action game genre and captured the look and feel of the frenetic fight scenes of the Bourne movies.

One of the other innovative visual features of the game was our “cinematic action” camera.  The team was influenced by the handheld, journalistic and raw camera style of director Paul Greengrass’ The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum movies.  The goal was to replicate that camera style into the real-time game engine and in-game movies.  The cinematic action camera stayed focused on the action with a controlled, handheld camera aesthetic.  Points in the camera’s viewport were prioritized to keep the action in frame without impeding the player’s ability to play.  The result gave the game a unique look that created an experience that mimicked the Greengrass camera style and raw handheld camera shots.

To create an even more cohesive, cinematic experience, color timing was introduced to establish mood, set up key events, and paint the scenes with a range of colors to augment story points.  

Released: 2015

Publisher: MZ

Platforms: iOS, Android

My Role: Art and Animation Director

My role on this project was managing a team of talented artists and animators to support content updates and sale animations for the massively popular and successful mobile MMO, Mobile Strike.  Overall, this was an in-sourcing experience, managing a remote group of artists working directly with corporate game art and marketing teams.  

Released: 2013

Publisher: MZ

Platforms: iOS, Android

My Role: Art and Animation Director

My role on this project was managing a team of talented artists and animators to support content updates and sale animations for the massively popular and successful mobile MMO, Game of War: Fire Age.  Overall, this was an in-sourcing experience, managing a remote group of artists working directly with corporate game art and marketing teams.  

Released: 2009/2010/2011

Publisher: Appy Entertainment, Inc.

Platforms: iOS, Android

My Role: Project Director, Art Manager, Animation Director

FaceFighter was an idea I had that would take the head swapping feature and technology from our first app, Appy News, and combine it with a mobile phone camera.  Add my love for kung fu movies and FaceFighter was born!  The idea was that player’s can take a picture of their friend’s or enemy’s face and transform them into a fighter in the game where you can punch, kick, bruise and damage their face.  Player’s can also use outrageous weapons such as a rubber chicken, a fish, a ukulele, and a lollipop to battle and combat your foes.  When the fight was over the victor can summon an Immortal Judgement such as a falling boulder, a lightning strike, or a heard of wildebeests to add final insult to their defeat.

The art vision was to capture the look and feel of a kung fu movie and combine it with exotic locales for backgrounds, over-the-top audio, and onomatopoeia graphics for added camp and charm.  Video was shot of my brother-in-law, who is master martial artist, to be the opponent’s body.  Then frames were extracted for animation with the head removed to later be replaced by the player’s custom head creation or one of the game’s wacky roster of characters’ faces.  Since we were using the Appy News engine, the animation required the using Apple Final Cut Pro to generate all the animations.  Essentially all the character animations and FX were created using a video editing program with no hierarchal rigging capabilities.  It was like animating a stop motion animated movie.  FaceFighter was a true labor of love.  The game became a viral mobile game sensation, reached number #1 in many countries around the world, and has been downloaded over 24 million times and counting!

Released: 2010

Publisher: Appy Entertainment, Inc.

Platforms: iOS, Android

My Role: Art Manager, Animation Director

Trucks and Skulls was created during the height of the physics-based puzzle games era and was aimed squarely at the male market.  Sometimes referred to as “Angry Birds for dudes”, the game was successful from the start and was featured as the iPhone and iPad Game of the Month on the Apple App Store during the lucrative Thanksgiving Week of 2010.  The game has 5.5 million downloads and counting.

Since the majority of the game revolved around physics and it’s emergent gameplay effects from the kinetic action, the focus of animations were in bringing as much personality to the Trucks special move animations and the games FX.  There were subtle ambient animations created for danger elements throughout the game and the Truck idle animations.

The User Interface design was focused on creating an impactful and violent attitude.  It’s about Trucks destroying Skulls!  This meant that transitions of pop up windows and screens, reward elements, and text used loads of scale and offsets for powerful and snappy animations.

There was a significant amount of effort to make a user friendly and powerful level creation tool for the iPad version of Trucks and Skulls.  Players had to be able to use the level editor effectively and easily to generate custom designed levels using all the features of the game.  This same tool was used by our own game designers to craft all the levels in the game.  Incorporating their feedback and the players that created levels, we were able to produce a fully working and robust level editor built into the game.

Released: 2011

Publisher: Appy Entertainment, Inc.

Platforms: iOS, Android

My Role: Art Manager, Animation Director

Spellcraft: School of Magic was the most ambitious and largest game produced while my time at Appy Entertainment.  It featured a load of RPG elements with CCG stye gameplay and had a free-to-play design focus from the start of production.  The art challenges ranged from creating a large number of monster card art, customizable wizardry wardrobe and gear, a strong UI presence, and a multitude of featured and ambient animations.

One of the challenges was to design a unified UI that was functional in the combat, spell making, wizard customization, dungeon exploration, plant cultivating, and dueling features.  The art direction called for the UI to emanate mysticism, ancient motifs, and fantasy using scrolls and carved brass accents.  There was a complex mix of meters, purchase opportunities, cauldron mixing, and contextual button presses that all had to clearly communicate player intentions and feedback.  

Animation priority was centered around the card combat system.  The wizard student’s hand was the only character animation required and was coupled with the player’s skill to communicate successful and failed wand strikes.  The cards themselves were treated as characters and incorporated squash and stretch techniques to communicate attacks and reactions.  The plants used in spell making were interesting characters themselves and used squash and stretch idle animations to give them life.  All the FX were hand animated and combined dynamic energy particles with ancient script and symbology.  

We used a combination of outsourcing art production and hired several freelance artists to help build the Spellcraft art content.  The coordination and management of these groups along with our small in-house team of artists gave us the experience necessary to give Appy Entertainment the confidence to take on larger scale mobile projects.

Released: Not Released 2014

Publisher: Appy Entertainment, Inc.

Platforms: PC/Steam

My Role: Art Manager, Animation Director

Bad Monkey is an homage to classic giant monster arcade games.  Our goal was to create the experience of being a raging giant ape through a populated urban environment unleashing mayhem and destruction in it’s wake.  Using the Unity game development platform, we were able to create a lush and dense world where every building was fully destructible and city objects can be used as weapons.  The Bad Monkey character had an engaging list of moves including: attacks, reactions, using city objects as weapons, different ways of devouring people, and mutation.  

The animation of the Bad Monkey giant monster was a combination of mocap and hand animation.  Performance is always key to getting great mocap data so fortunately for us we had an opportunity to work a performance capture actor who had worked on the Godzilla 2014 movie.  There were several animation states that made it a challenge than tradition brawling action games that include: wall climbing states, on the street, in the air, and weapon wielding states.  The challenge was to create smooth and seamless transitions between states that looked natural yet maintained responsiveness with the controls.  I personally had fun animating the different actions the giant ape could execute with the people in the city such as using a street light to golf swing on hapless victims or grabbing a helicopter and using it’s spinning blades as a buzz saw to mow down a mob of soldiers.

We targeted a hyper-realistic look for the game influenced by stop motion animated movies.  The design of the city props and characters had stylish, exaggerated proportions with realistic textures and materials.  Along with the lighting scheme, the entire game had a unique look that had depth and atmosphere and provided a rich environment for the ensuing mayhem players will unleash onto the world.

Released: 2012

Publisher: Disney Interactive

Platforms: iOS, Android

My Role: Project Director, Art Manager, Animation Director

I was responsible for managing a small team of in-house and freelance artists and animators to develop content for the game including 2D character animations, user unterface design and updates, and in-game movies featuring the cast of characters from the game.  Since we were working closely with Disney, one of the biggest challenges was to understand and replicate the Phineas and Ferb style of animation and visual designs.  We worked under the supervision of Disney Interactive animators producing character animations using Adobe Flash that were processed using Disney’s proprietary animation and art asset processing tools.

The characters we animated for Where’s My Perry? Calling All Agents were all the supporting team characters from O.W.C.A. including Agent Peter the Panda and Agent Pinky.  These were character animations in the Calling All Agents missions for each level, the level transitions, and beginning and ending mission movies.  The movies were especially challenging because they were displayed in the portrait orientation with more vertical than horizontal space in this display ratio leading to tricky shot composition.  Humor is a big part of the show so we had to animate a range of comical scenes using timing, fourth wall interaction, and strong poses.  

Overall, it was a great experience working with Disney, especially the close collaboration with their animators to understand and create 2D character animations using their techniques, pipeline, and best practices.

Released: Not released 2014

Publisher: Appy Entertainment, Inc.

Platforms: iOS, Android

My Role: Art Manager, Animation Director

Spellcraft 2: Magic University was going to be a sequel that combined lessons learned from the first game and incorporated features from Animal Legends for a more complete free-to-play experience.  Artistically, we wanted to push the quality by raising the bar on the number and type of character animations for the heroes and enemies.  The FX had to stand out in the combat experience and effectively communicate the spellcasting, attacks, and reactions with precision and a high aesthetic.  The user interface was more complex especially around the combat system that was to feature animated spell casting mini movies.  The maps of the university and the dungeons were going to paint a much bigger wizardry world.

To scale the number of wizard and monster characters and maintain a manageable production schedule, a modular system was adapted from the Animal Legends game.  Several templates and character classes were created for the hero and monster characters so that gear and animations can be more easily shared and iterated on.   The animations were 2D and used 2D puppet rigs using Apple Motion.

The FX evolved from the first game with a more layered display.   Loads of FX were needed for the massive number of spells required for the combat experience.  The FX were all hand animated and incorporated animated frames and secondary layers for more dynamic FX.

Released: 2012/2013

Publisher: Appy Entertainment, Inc.

Platforms: iOS, Android

My Role: Art Manager, Animation Director

After the success of our first RPG and free-to-play game, Spellcraft: School of Magic, we wanted to build off that experience and develop an even more ambitious game.  Animal Legends would feature the largest number of animated characters and world building features ever developed at Appy Entertainment.   The game would also feature a large inventory of items that can be purchased including weapons, gear, and buildings.  

The biggest challenge for the art team was to generate a large number of assets that included ten heroes and dozens of enemy animal combatants.  Each hero has customizable gear including: helmets, shoulder armor, chest armor, weapons, shields, shin armor, and boots.  Each gear was custom designed and unique to each hero.  We had to develop customizable gear tech that work seamlessly with the user interface and gameplay.  There were also 16 different buildings for building your animal empire.  

Like our other ambitious games, we were heavily reliant on our outsourcing partners and vetted freelance artists and animators to augment our art production.  The challenge here was that the game was a very different art style than previous work we’ve collaborated on in our past games.  It took time, loads of feedback, and some training to prepare the team for production.  Careful work was done in building detailed outsourcing reference packets that left nothing to chance or interpretation, and regular meetings and feedback sessions pushed the limits of our art team’s ability to maintain schedules while managing the efforts of the outside assistance.

We continued to use Apple Motion as the tool of choice for rigging the characters and character animation production.  Each character had a set of combat animations that included attacks, reactions, intros, death, and special moves.  The FX for the game were more complex than previous Appy games and was a crucial component of the combat experience.  The FX was used to highlight hero and enemy states, special magical FX, crushing and impactful reactions.  The world had a number of ambient animations that included building construction, thicket and land clearing, and building idles.  

The animation direction was concentrated on giving personality and attitude to the hero characters and accentuating the character design with charm and humor.  The enemy animal characters had loads of attitude themselves and were a diverse roster of eccentric characters.  We used 2D puppet animation techniques layered with FX and utilizing squash and stretch for additional weight and punchiness.  Offsets and subtle secondary animations were crucial to achieve natural looking motion especially on the gear and armor pieces layered on top of the hero characters giving that extra amount of thoroughness that showed depth and attention to detail in the character animations.

Released: 2010

Publisher: Appy Entertainment, Inc.

Platforms: iOS, Android

My Role: Project Director, Art Manager, Animation Director

Tune Runner was a music game that combined an endless runner with hand drawing a variety of shapes to propel the main character, a dancing boombox named Groov-EE, through a level generated by the player’s own music library.  Each song generated a unique leaderboard where player’s can compete with others from around the world to become the best player for that tune.  

The art vision was to place emphasis on Groov-EE and the shapes that the player’s had to draw for the game to keep progressing.  The second layer was the electrical FX generated as the player touched and drew the shapes directly on the screen.  The backgrounds were the last layer and were designed to complement the gameplay with a bit of DJ graphics influence and psychedelic themes.  The UI was based on old style jukebox cabinet designs and sheet music.

Groov-EE was animated using puppet 2D techniques using Apple Motion, a motion graphics application.  I was able to create a hierarchal character rig with this application.  More importantly, we were able to utilize the same pipeline from Facefighter using the animation XML processing of animation data to run in Appy’s proprietary 2D game engine.  Groov-EE was animated with a lot of personality using squash and stretch to exaggerate and keep him loose and nimble with a bounce in his step to keep player’s grooving to the beat.  Some of his animations included moonwalking, popping and locking, and breakdancing.