Game
Dev
LEAD TECHNICAL ARTIST
TOOLS PROGRAMMER
UNITY SPECIALIST
AND
CHILL PERSON
Trev
The TLDR
Summary
Howdy, I'm Trev! Welcome to my site. If you've got things to do and places to be, this section is for you!
I'm a Lead Tech Artist based in Canberra, Australia. I've been making games for 14 years now. I have a heavy emphasis on programming, tools, shaders and making things feel juicy and responsive.
I've worked in an eclectic scattering of areas, from Indie games to AAA Games, Museum exhibits and interactive playgrounds to teaching game design. I've worked with a bunch of different tech, currently the cofounder of Space Dragon Games, working on a roguelite deckbuilding tower defence.
You can grab my resume here
You can reach out to me here
What Is Tech Art
The Support Class of Game Dev
What even is Tech Art? I ask this question to every Tech Artist I meet, and I get a different answer every time, along with a look of panic in their eyes as if I've caught them not really knowing either.
Tech Art means different things to different teams. Some studios think it's mostly VFX, some think it's character rigging and animation, or UI or shaders or tools programming or game feel or a million other things.
The common threads that I can find amongst each Tech Artist I've asked is that we are flexible enough to fill holes in a team, we're force multipliers and we're miscellaneous problem solvers. We elevate the art, we automate the rest. We're the support class of Game Dev. We're the jack of all trades and we can do a great impression of a bunch of different specialist roles. Because of this broad skill set, we can tackle problems from multiple angles simultaneously to find the best solution, we can fill whatever role the team needs most and we can pivot as the needs change.
We're great at coordinating technical implementation because we can see how all the puzzle pieces could fit together and how they would best fit together. Ensuring that the art goes into the gameplay systems without a hitch and that the gameplay systems are ready to interact with art the way they're supposed to. We make sure that everyone's on the same page, we catch issues early rather than when everything is coming together in the final hour, we tackle problems from multiple angles to find the best solution and we educate and upskill those around us so that they can do it too. We sit in the chaotic centre between Art and Programming teams and ensure that everything meets in the middle.
When we're not needed though, when things aren't on fire and the game making machine is quietly churning out game, that's when we're at our absolute best. Give me a week to work on something cool and I will automate some repetitive pain point out of our pipeline, or I'll build a tool that will save the team weeks or months of time over the course of the project, or I'll future-proof something now that would have ground the project down to a halt later down the line. The goal here is to maximise the amount of time that each member of the team is doing what they're great at by simplifying the processes that take up the rest of their time.
So, to sum it all up, we kind of do a bit of everything. We're the go-to for problem solving with out of the box thinking, we're here to make sure everything runs smoothly and we're here to support the team in any way we can.
Who Am I
A brief blurb about me
What Im currently doing
Where Im At
Howdy, I'm Trev! I'm a Tech Artist in Canberra. I read a lot of books, play a lot of board games, play a lot of weird little indie games, massive fantasy nerd. Love camping in the mountains, love dogs, love my wife. Listen to metal, prog and anything chill. If we have any of the above in common, we'll get along great, unless it's the loving my wife thing. Generally a chill person.
I'm currently Lead Tech Artist/Lead Programmer at Space Dragon Games, working on RocketCard Defence, a roguelite card game tower defence. Its the first project for this lil team and we've only just started but we're making leaps and bounds every week.
The project is being built using a modular framework called Codeblocks that I've been building on and off for personal projects over the last few years, which is super neat to be working with, and the project emphasises building things fast, building them modularly and building them in a way we can iterate and pivot incredibly quickly. Codeblocks empowers the whole team to be building and designing, and allows us to shift the core rules of the game very quickly. Its great
Projects
Things I've worked on
Out of the 15 projects I've worked on, 8 are out in the wild and fully released. Some are up on steam, some are on Android/IOS, some are on the Quest store and lastly a few you might have to go to specific museums to check out (if their exhibits are still up, its been a while).
Out of the remainder, 4 of them are scheduled to come out in 2024, 2 are on hiatus and one is cancelled.
From Anonymous feedback
Testimonials
These testimonials were given anonymously to my manager as part of our regular 360 feedback process and serve as a better testimonial to my skills than any carefully constructed statement could ever be. It's not a purpose-built statement from a few friends, it's the honest opinions of the people I work with all day, every day, given completely anonymously and every word of it is glowing praise.
No Process Too Technical
"I believe I said this last feedback and it remains true in this one, Trev is likely the hardest working individual in the company.
Trev throws his all into every task, big or small, driven by an unshakable desire for the best possible result to end up in players hands.
There is no process too technical and no task too monolithic for Trev to handle. He does great planning, gives great feedback, follows procedure to the letter and outputs stellar work."
Not a walled garden
"Trev is a great human to work with.
He's an expert in his area but doesn't make it feel like a walled garden for him to protect, instead offering insight and opportunities to learn.
Trev does a good job protecting himself and his teams from risk by asking granular, articulate questions during any design reviews or meetings.
Trev is always great about providing all the needed context, and goes out of his way to make everything the best it can be.
He's great about following process and understands when to bend the rules, or call people out (kindly) for not following the rules."
A Nexus
"It’s very good to work with him, he’s patient and efficient, and has a deep understanding of the project, being able to make good prioritisations and decisions.
He’s also very good at keeping the whole team updated, and he many times acts as a nexus between the art team and the engineering team, with a great understanding of which information is relevant to which team member.
He also manages expectations, and is good at handling the pressure that comes from different members and areas expecting different things from our team at different moments.
He also has a good understanding of our users, always following our discord, and with a good panorama on what the pain points and complaints are most visible in the community."
no matter what task
"Trev always has a friendly attitude and a willingness to help, no matter what task he is involved in.
His technical knowledge of the entire game and ability to translate that knowledge to layman's terms to the art team has been invaluable in making sure we are creating art correctly for it's usage.
I still use quick tools Trev wrote in a few hours in my first days and I trust him implicitly about any art implementation in the game, as well as having an understandable eye into other games systems."
my skills
What Im great at
Teams
Cool People I've worked with
You would think that Tech Art is really easy to show off. You can show some cool shaders or some particle systems and they look great, but they're only one part of tech art. How do you show off tools or pipelines? How do you convey that you're great at supporting an art team? How do you show soft skills like leadership and mentoring?
Further down is some examples of work I've done and musings on Tech Art and development in general, in an attempt to demonstrate that I can Tech Art.
My skill set is more broad than a typical Tech Artist, and with a heavier focus on the programming side. I can do a great impression of a bunch of different roles and can fill in as a Senior Programmer on anything except networking/server stuff, but I enjoy UI, tools, shaders, and getting good game-feel through particles, shaders and micro-animation to make things feel juicy and responsive.
How I improve
What I focus on to be a better tech artist
As a general philosophy, while I can do most things in game dev I focus on improving my knowledge based skills that don't require a thousand hours of practice and then if left alone you become rusty.
You become a better programmer by knowing better patterns and structure, you become a better artist by long hours of practicing. I'll never be as good as an artist that spends their time making art all day every day, I cant keep up with that, but I can learn better patterns and structure, learn an engine inside and out and learn best practices and procedures. These are all skills that won't get rusty if I spread myself too thin.
I'm actively working on Leadership skills, as my current role has me leading the art team. If you have any good book recommendations on Leadership (or just general fiction), I would love to hear them!
Jack of all trades, master of most
Skills
Tech Art touches on so many different disciplines that you could get a handful of tech artists together in a room and compare their skill sets, and only about half of their collective skills might overlap
I focus mostly on engine side stuff and team support with a heavier emphasis on programming than most Tech Artists I've worked with, but an incomplete list of my skills are listed out below. Past that there are some musings on individual skills, along with some pretty pictures I've made
Leadership
Mentorship and training are the two core pillars of my leadership style. It takes a village to build a game and you need that village to be highly skilled and effective developers. You need your programmers and your artists collaborating together effectively, and to facilitate that you need to educate your team about each others areas to get the possible results.
Each team member is a specialist in their own area and one of the most important parts of leading specialists is listening to them or getting their input on things that touch on their area of expertise.
Whether I'm leading a team or just part of the crew, I am constantly trying to find opportunities to cross-train the team. A little bit of extra knowledge can go a long way. The other side of this coin is that I'm usually surrounded by specialists and am constantly learning from the team around me.
Tools and
Automation
Tools are force multipliers for a team. Automation saves valuable time and resources. If you're not doing both, you're doing game dev wrong.
Tools I've built in the past include
Code Blocks (Ask me about this one, it's sweet), Automated art asset processing and art database management, Art pipeline helpers, Automated performance measurement, Art Content management dashboards, Material Variant creation and management, Automated prefab creation from templates, Automated folder structures + naming schemes, Light baking helper tool suite, Automatic stairs and other similar tools, Simple Animation systems based on Dotween, Asset Migration tools, Basic mocap systems, In-Unity wiki integration, and about a million quick and dirty tools to fill one specific one-off purpose
Shaders
Shaders are the secret sauce of game development. You can take something that looks fine to something that looks phenomenal.
I love shaders, they're my very favourite thing to make. There's a huge amount of variance in what you can do with shaders, and most people only think of the cool splashy effects. Splashy effects are very fun to make although my favourite thing to do with shaders is taking disparate art assets and pulling them all into one style with some clever shader work and repurposing different texture maps.
The best thing about this approach is that you can take multiple assets from different asset collections, that aren't designed to work together, and pull them all into the same art style in a fraction of the time that it would take a 3d artist to create those assets from scratch, or reuse existing assets and make them look like they're completely new and fresh.
Programming
I'm big on modularity when it comes to programming and it's an area I'm actively keen to become an expert in.
Every system I build, whether it's gameplay or a tool, I make things as reusable or modular as possible.
The system I'm most proud of is my Code Blocks system and if you want to see how far you can possibly push modularity in a project you should ask me about it
Atmosphere
Atmosphere is one of the trickiest things to build in a game. It takes a range of skills from a bunch of departments, from art to sound to writing to UX all being led by strong art director with great artistic vision to pull off a perfect atmosphere.
This scene here was a one-day visual-only atmosphere experiment, using a bunch of quick tricks to help build a mood with a strong focus on post-processing effects. All models were from the Unity asset store, although shaders are all custom and some textures have been swapped.
This was a great little demo of what I can throw together in a short time period.
GAME UI
The broadly held opinion on Unity's UI system is that it's awful to work with. It's too hard to work with for artists with no scripting knowledge past the basics, and it takes a programmer with a creative streak to get the most out of it.
The ideal setup would be one 2d artist paired with a programmer to handle UI, or one Tech Artist who's been using it so long that they're Stockholm Syndromed into liking it.
I'm the latter, and I'm damn good at it. I've been using Unity's canvas UI system since it came out in 4.6. If you need literally anything in UI space, I can do it and I can do it performantly with tweens, shaders and Tech Art magic.
Pro Tip: If you use animators on canvases, somewhere out there a Tech Artist feels a chill down their spine. They do horrible horrible things for your performance, spread the word
VFX
VFX work is the ultimate combination of multiple disciplines all working together.
To make great VFX you need to nail the particle systems, but supporting that is shader work, animation systems, sound design, occasionally physics stuff and gameplay elements
Great VFX comes from when all of these work together in perfect harmony
a timeline of where ive been
Things Ive Done
2023 - 2024
Creature
Lead Technical Artist
Working on Starship Home, a cozy MR game about growing plants and exploring the galaxy. I was the teams Lead Tech Artist and responsible for squeezing out every tiny bit of performance we can from cutting edge VR headsets, making super pretty VFX and Shaders and making everything feel juicy and responsive
2022
Playcorp - Beyond Contact
Senior Tech Artist
Briefly brought onto the Playcorp team to help them get their game, Beyond Contact, over the line from Early Access to Full Release
2022
Amplitude Sega - Unannounced Project
Lead Technical Artist
Leading the Tech Art Team and working closely with both Art and Programming teams to build automated art pipelines in a continuous delivery environment. This project has allowed me to build some of the coolest tools and most stylised shaders I've ever worked on.
This project has unfortunately been put on hold and the team disbanded
2018-2020
Immutable - Gods Unchained
Senior Tech Artist, acting as Lead
Leading the Tech Art team on one of the worlds largest block-chain games. I joined at the start of the project and helped build and grow the game in a games-as-a-service model into the industry leader it is today.
I am not a fan of NFT's though.
2024 - Current
SD Games
Cofounder/Lead Programmer
Making a roguelite tower defence card game thats yet to be announced, SD games is a small team of two, and we’re making small games that blend the strategic elements from roguelite deckbuilders with the tactical elements of tower defence games
2023-2024
SMG
VFX Artist
Temporary short contract as an extra pair of hands for the VFX team, working on an unannounced project and making the game feel juicy and responsive. This role is pretty low-key and isnt a step forward in my career, but as soon as the game is announced I'll be giving infinite playground bragging rights to my nephew which is a worthy tradeoff.
2022-2024
Anecdote Games - Outpost
Lead Tech Artist
This small and scrappy Canberra team is building an atmospheric horror game while still getting up off the ground. Making very cool things in an impressively short time period, but we were strictly keeping this project as a side gig/weekend project
2020-2022
LAI Games
Senior Tech Artist
Working with both physical arcade games and VR games. I'm managing the day to day of the Art Team, managing external artists and handling all Tech Art for the project
2017
Freelance Consultant
Unity Specialist
Offering private training and support for the Unity engine
2017-2018
Solo Developer
Generalist
2 years spent on solo Indie development on an unreleased game, filling every role. The game was 90% done when I ran out of budget and had to move on to other work, but was an incredible learning experience.
2017
Educational Games
Generalist
Worked on multiple short form educational games to teach school kids science concepts through the Legends of Learning platform
2017
Exhibit
Tech Artist/Programmer
Simulator for the winter Olympic sport Skeleton Run for the Australian Institute of Sport. It's like street luge but on a bobsled track. Custom hardware installation and custom controller
2016
Museum Exhibit
Tech Artist/Programmer
Submarine Play Area for the Australian National Maritime Museum. Custom hardware to control an in-game submarine that was built into a kids playground
2016
Museum Exhibit
Tech Artist/Programmer
Garrigarrang Seasonal Calendar for the National Museum of Australia. Large Touchscreen display exhibit
2014-2016
Design Teacher
Academy of Interactive Entertainemnt
Teaching Cert III of Game Design
and short courses for school aged kids
2014
Academy of Interactive Entertainment
Graduate Diploma in Management
2012-2013
Academy of Interactive Entertainment
Adv. Diploma of Professional Games Development
(Specialising in Programming)
2015
Museum Exhibit App
Tech Artist/Programmer
Mobile game created for Questacon, Australia's largest science museum, to tie into a physical exhibit at the museum
2014-2017
Siege Sloth Games
Co-founder/Tech Art
We created multiple educational games, focusing on teaching history and biology, and won several awards in the Serious Games genre, both nationally and internationally
2010-2011
Academy of Interactive Entertainment
Adv. Diploma of Professional Games Development
(Specialising in Art)
2011
Micro Forté
QA Testing
QA drone on an unreleased project and some brief QA on the BigWorld engine. This role was wrapped up when the engine was sold to Wargaming
For anyone unfamiliar with the Aus qualifications system, an Adv. Diploma is one step down from a bachelor degree, a Graduate Diploma is one up from a bachelor, one down from a Masters
Contact Me
How can you reach out?
The easiest way to reach me is via email. In an effort to not give my email to robots that trawl sites for contact info for spam emails, I've not included it directly in a copy/pasteable format.