Art Director · Buffalo Buffalo
Re:Rite
Defining the visual strategy of an original indie robot fighter, from first pitch through production.
- Role
- Art Director
- Studio
- Buffalo Buffalo
- Years
- 2025–2026
- Platforms
- PC, PS5, Xbox
- Tools
- Unity
- Team
- Team of 20 · 6 artists
Re:Rite is an original indie game releasing Q4 2026. I defined the visual strategy from the initial pitch through production and was responsible for the overall art direction, working with a talented group of six artists.
Directing the art team
At Buffalo Buffalo I managed the full art pipeline across characters, arenas, enemies and UI. Day to day, that meant:
- Ensuring quality and pushing art direction on all character, environment and UI assets.
- Working with the Creative Director and relaying feedback to keep the team coordinated and on schedule.
- Unblocking workflows and technical issues.
- Creating new workflows and pipeline solutions, including AI-assisted tools, to speed up production.
- Making sure every artist had clear goals and understood their role.
- Supporting marketing needs through each phase of the project.
Pillars of Re:Rite
The game revolves around robot fighters with massive transformations that lead to David-versus-Goliath fights. That shaped the four art areas I organized the team around.
- 01
Character Art
Each character needed three tiers of transformation and a wide variety of attack animations to support the weapon system.
- 02
Environment Art
A semi-procedural environment workflow that delivered 8 unique maps with special mechanics, using only two 3D artists.
- 03
Technical Art
Developing the team's technical capability and tech art stack, plus the project's optimization strategy and guidelines.
- 04
UI/UX Art
All menus, interactions and platform requirements, including storefront and achievements.
Art process improvements
On Re:Rite I worked one-on-one with each artist, which let me understand their bottlenecks first-hand. I adapted our processes and introduced new tools to cut the time artists spent on technical issues and give them more time for creative work:
- A genAI-assisted pipeline that takes a single 2D concept and produces front, side and back views for our modellers. Turnarounds had been taking up to 50% of our designers’ concept time.
- An automated export system for character animations that applies project requirements such as naming conventions, frame lengths and project locations.
- Automated capture tools for marketing and conventions.