Hi, I’m Dan! I’m an IMGD BA Junior with a Tech Art concentration and a CS minor, and I’m from a small town in Massachusetts a little over half an hour from Worcester. Art is something that I enjoy and have been practicing a lot more than ever before thanks to classes, though I still have a ways to go. I may not be the best or most experienced artist out there, but it is something that I find fun and have a decent degree of affinity and talent for. Since I also have an affinity for technical things, that niche in-between art and tech (which generally ends up being tech art, but extends into things like 3d modeling and animation) is a place where I feel like I might be able to have a career. I’ve taken a lot of art and art-adjacent courses – both 3d modelings, 3d environmental modeling, 2d and 3d animation, 2d animation practicum, tech art and character rigging, digital painting… – so I’m familiar to some degree with all the tools and many of the techniques we’ll be using. The real challenge will come from pulling everything together! I’m interested in improving my ability to do detail better, as that’s one of the things I struggle with getting to look good the most in art – either I try to add too much, or I’m not sure how to add enough! 

I’ve made a few small games for classes, as well as a 2d platformer demo in Unity as a personal project the summer before college. The closest thing I’ve done to what we’ll be doing this class would probably be my 3D Environmental Modeling environment, though that was in Unreal and used pre-made assets for a lot of the natural features. In addition to making games and digital art, I’m a huge fan of worldbuilding, writing/narrative design and game design, so I try to do those for projects whenever I can! On a related note, I’ve been working on getting a questing plot series started for a LARP, and so far I’ve designed and run several small-scale quests at other events and handed out some bits of worldbuilding and lore to the players. 

I’m a fan of a lot of different games, so there’s inspirations from a lot of different places that show up in my projects. RPGS (and JRPGS in particular) like Xenoblade Chronicles (as I mentioned in the inspirations assignment) and Final Fantasy games often have amazing environments, stories, and world/character designs. On the flip side of things, I find a lot of indies (Hollow Knight! Chants of Sennaar! Ori!) to be inspiring as well with their unique aesthetics, interesting mechanics and hidden depth. It’s also inspiring to see small-scale games succeed as they’re not that far from something I could make (Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion was a student project at Becker College, made two blocks away from where South Village is now!) 

If you want to see more, here’s the link to my portfolio which shows a lot of my recent projects: https://design44.github.io/portfolio/ 

Nuno Sanches™: Atomic Flood by D44