One of the cool perks I personally enjoyed during my four years at Visual Concepts was how willing they were to let us explore work outside our traditional roles. For example, you can see some of the court designs I created in my main portfolio, but I wanted to use this blog post as a chance to show off some of the other work I did that I’d consider a little more miscellaneous.
To start, I was assigned to create 10 murals for MyCourt. For context, MyCourt is a game mode that allows players to invite others online for private matches—but more relevant to this post, it also lets players unlock different banners, murals, and various other items to decorate their own MyCourt. I had already started a bit on the first two, but it was more of a side task alongside other work I was doing at the time. Then I was told, actually, we need to wrap these up in about two weeks. It turned out to be a miscommunication from one of our other teams, but it was the tail end of crunch, and everything was winding down. I’m sure they had a lot of plates spinning, and it probably just got lost in the shuffle how important these tasks actually were.
This first one is for Donovan Mitchell, aka Spida. I had done most of the line art for this one by the time the deadline bomb dropped on me. I rushed the render a bit and would’ve loved a little more time to really polish it up, but given the time frame I had to work on it, I’m pretty proud of how it came out.
This was the other one I had started before I knew the actual deadline. I had the sketch done, but I really wanted to push myself to complete it because I loved the idea for this one too. So honestly, for these first two, I did really crunch on them and had to make a few compromises because I just wanted to see them through. All that being said, I’m happy with how these two turned out. Plus, I just had a lot of fun making them as well.This one is of Kevin Garnett and his famous quote, "Anything is Possible."
This is how they are displayed in the game. Unfortunately I don't have the other back wall to show off and also this was before someone had pushed a fix for this mural wall because as you can tell it is being slightly squashed in the 3D render.
This one for example was a little more closer to how the other 8 were handled. Unfortunately due to me getting laid off I don't have the others that I had made but fortunately I think this one was one of the stronger pieces anyways. This one was for Giannis Antetokounmpo aka the Greek Freak.
I had to be creative because the deadlines were so tight. I’d really have to push myself pretty hard to draw something like this in a more traditional sense, so I opted to do the smart thing and utilize Blender to make a sweet render, then use assets of the athletes we already had. It took me a little over a workday to finish one of these. I’d be about 90 percent done by the end of the day, then I’d do a bit of polishing the next morning, export it, and take care of everything needed to get it into the game.
Mind you, these all started from nothing other than the prompt I was given—“Hey, we need a mural of X athlete.” I definitely could’ve just done them all in the same style, but I challenged myself to make each mural unique. Plus, I just had faith in myself to get the rest of them done within the timeline. For example, I did one for Wilt Chamberlain and made a collage of a bunch of his jerseys, since we had a lot of renders of them in our depot.
Here are three other logos and graphics that I designed for the game. This kind of logo and design work initially felt pretty foreign to me, since I never really had much interest in doing this type of work before, and it is a bit different from how I typically like to approach my personal projects. Regardless, I really grew to love it and honestly would not mind exploring more graphic design and even motion design in the future. Also, getting the chance to do work like this was always a nice break from the typical 3D work my job usually involved.
Also, I got the chance to design clothing as well. Unfortunately, this is the only one I was able to save. These were unlockable pieces of clothing that players could earn by playing and completing limited timed events in the online part of the MyCareer mode. At the time, I do not quite remember why, but I also had to wrap these up quickly because another fire came up, and I was the one with the most knowledge of how to fix it. It was most likely something to do with UI, since I volunteered to help that team a lot. I got the chance to make quite a bit more clothing, but unfortunately I cannot show those off because I only have shots of them in debug mode, and I am unable to share those images. I know for a fact the spray can was put on a shirt at the very least.
All in all, we were always on and off with tight deadlines, but honestly, I think my brain works pretty well with a fire under me. Although at the time I was often a little down on myself for a lot of these pieces, because in the moment all I could think about was how I could have made them look better if I just had more time. With the benefit of hindsight and considering all the other factors that went into making these, I am proud of this work regardless.
To also address the elephant in the room, because I mentioned it a couple of times: I was laid off in late 2023, and it saddens me to see the continued layoffs happening at the Austin office as well as across the rest of our industry going into the new year. We had an awesome team of talented folks, and I am sure everyone will land on their feet including myself eventually. The job market is just a little rough out there right now, to say the least. Anyway, I am very proud of my time with the company. I joined Hookbang in late 2019 when they were a small company of about 15 employees, and we got acquired by Visual Concepts and grew to about 80 plus people. Most of the growth happened during Covid, so it really hit me that, “Wow, I actually made it,” when we finally started going back into the office. We moved up from a small, cramped open space office to having my own personal office in The Domain, which for context is like a giant outdoor mall that is the pseudo downtown area for north Austin. I felt like even though we were growing so fast, we never really lost our original culture, so it still felt like we were that small little company for the longest time.
Anyway, expect a few other blog posts dropping as I try to share some other miscellaneous 2K work I managed to save, and I am cooking up two other projects that I want to document here as well.
Cheers,
Danny Tamez