Star Wars: Smugglers Gambit is a new UEFN/Fortnite Island developed internally by Disney Games and Digital Entertainment - play it with Island Code 7474-2686-2725. This experience takes place over multiple locations on a new Star Wars planet Ord Ryla. This collection focuses on my work for the newly released 'Rift Encounters' events that spawn in the Wilds Open World - where you get to face off against fun non-canon enemies such as Samurai Vader.
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This was a fun space to work on as I got to have a lot of creative ownership and freedom. From the high-level brief and references we got from our Lead Designer, I was free to explore the visuals of the space without the aid of concept art as they were busy with other things. Our memory budget was fairly tight, so I had to find clever ways of re-skinning and re-using existing assets and kits from our main world. I came up with a good visual recipe and pieces that I could give to my the Level Design Lead, Jed Bellini, to come up with the arena layout flexibly with organic rock pieces. Given the short timeline of creating this event and space after launch, I had to iterate quickly, get new versions in front of the team often, to land on the final look we shipped with. Through riffing with my lead, Martin, and the rest of the team, ended up landing on a a dreamy floating island + underwater vibe that provided clean bounds to the arena Design came up with. In the end, I did all the visual ideation for the space, did worldbuilding with all our existing assets while reskinning them smartly, lit the environment, came up with custom WPO Shader logic for the large floating rocks (instead of relying on more costly skeletal meshes or Sequencer anims), iterated based on weekly playtests, did a clean clipping pass for navmesh and smooth player navigation and did all the final bug fixing and polish.

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Original rock kit (I just did some material re-skinning tweaks) & some final lighting tweaks by Martin Teichmann. Original tree/roots kit by me originally w/custom material overrides for the space. Small foliage kit re-used and re-skinned from Jedi: Survivor foliage we were provided with. Everything else is re-used assets from the Star Wars kit provided in UEFN/Fortnite.
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Art Director:
Ken Morse
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Lead Environment Artist:
https://www.artstation.com/mayday
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Environment Artists:
https://www.artstation.com/brianbeppu
https://www.artstation.com/mollywarner
https://www.artstation.com/invader-roxas
https://www.artstation.com/jobyek
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Environment Concept Artists:
https://www.artstation.com/walkingjayart
https://www.artstation.com/kellyperry
https://www.artstation.com/jenmeiart
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Level Designers:
Jed Bellini
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FX Artists:
https://www.artstation.com/justinwoodard
https://www.artstation.com/nfaithhui
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Lead Character Artist & Character/Vehicle Outsource Management:
https://www.artstation.com/hcldesignworks

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