TAYLOR PATE
Technical Animator
Roles and Responsibilities
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Textured both team variations of the player character
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Designed both team flags
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Modeled and textured clutter
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Concepted The Watcher rifle
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Textured The Tome weapon
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Drew graffiti and pathfinding decals
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Concepted both teams' gods and bases
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Painted murals for both team bases
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Designed HUD
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Painted skydome
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Voiced blue team's god
Game Information
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Title - Cult
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Studio - Dead Pixel (7 developers)
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Engine - Unreal 4
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Made in 16 weeks - shipped May 2015
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16 work hours per week
 Both gods at the start of a match |  Courtyard of blue base |  Mural of the Giggling Void |
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 Interior of blue base |  Courtyard of red base |  Mural of the Ripped Flesh |
 Interior of red base |  The Tome in-game |  The Watcher in-game |
 The Bugshot in-game |  Full view of the map |  Cult's skydome |
Post-Mortem
What Went Well
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The art team locked onto an art direction almost immediately, so it was easy to create consistent assets.
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The team was able to quickly adapt to changes in the project, due to a strong team vision.
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Cult is very much my style, so I had the opportunity to put a lot of my personality into the assets I made.
What Went Wrong
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We switched from using the Unreal Development Kit to Unreal 4 in the middle of the project, neccessitating a lot of rework.
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The project requirements were not always clear, leading to miscommunications with executive producers, and rushed fixes.
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The original idea was overscoped, so we had to take time to adjust the game mechanics.
What I Learned
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Even concept art sketched on notebook paper is better than no concept art at all.
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Establishing an art direction early on means more time to create assets.
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It's important that everything reflects the aesthetic and personality of the game, even small things like bottles and candles.
Individual Assets
Cult Trailer
The prop assets for Cult are all modular, with a separate texture set to correspond with whether they belong to the red team or the blue team. Each team also has a unique brush, to further add personality to their props. The red team has a heavier knit type of brush, and the blue team has a delicate, lacy brush.
I hand painted the skydome for Cult, to further the game's art direction. I used purples in order to match the colors of the hub zone, and because it's a blend of the two team colors. It has two layers, the main sky with stars, and a separate section for the darker clouds. The moon is on a transparent plane hanging between the two layers.
 The original version of The Giggling Void, blue team's god. |  Final concept of The Giggling Void |  Original concepts of The Ripped Flesh, red team's god |
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 Final concept of The Ripped Flesh |  Original concept for The Watcher sniper rifle |  Final concept for The Watcher |
 Concept for the fountain in the center of the main area |  Concept for the medium sized health pickup |  The original idea for the flag. It was later changed to an actual flag |
I hand-wrote all the runes found in game, so that they would be consistent. From left to right, these are the shield secondary fire from the tome, the tome texture, and the circle that was split up to create the HUD.