Lost Cubes (2012 - 2013)
Company : Playlab
​Release : 8 January 2013​
Genre : Puzzle
Platform : IOS, Android
Engine : Unity3D
Team size : 5
Playlab offered me the opportunity to kickstart my career in the gaming industry. When I joined in October 2012, Lost Cubes was in the final stages of production but had memory issues with RAM and app size.
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Highlights :
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First time working in the video game industry
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Learned Unity3D (3.0) as we polished the game for full release
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Learned how to use Git for source control
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Took 2D artists' artworks, reformatted, resized, and integrated them into the project (unaware at the time that this was a technical artist role)
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Learned how to optimize 2D games, including managing fill rates, draw calls, and power-of-two textures
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Solved RAM issues and enabled the game to run on the 1st generation iPad (128MB RAM)
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Ensured the app size was below 50MB for cellular downloads on the App Store
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Conducted iOS releases, manually building from Unity to Xcode to device
Juice Cubes (2013 - 2016)
Company : Playlab
​Release : 31 October 2013​
Genre : Puzzle
Platform : IOS, Android, WebGL
Engine : Unity3D
Team size : 5-10
Now the team is more familiar with developing 2D games in Unity. This next game became a global success, bringing the company to its peak.​
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Highlights :
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Successfully convinced the artist team to use Unity's animation tool to animate game elements (previously used frame-by-frame sprites)
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Assigned with level design tasks and found editing .json for level data troublesome and prone to human error. I used my spare time to learn C# and developed a Level Editor Tool in Unity, which received huge praise from the team
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Assigned to maintain the Level Editor to ensure support for newly introduced puzzle features
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Became more involved in the technical artist role, serving as the major contact point for feature design, pipeline design, art asset specifications, and creating scripts to assist 2D artists working inside Unity
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"The Prefab guy"
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Started learning basic shader writing, creating simple 2D sprite effects like additive tint and flat color sprite shaders
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In charge of implementing support for various localization languages
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Led UI implementation for UI elements requiring polish and special artistic attention
Helped artists transition to using Unity's animation tool for animating
Created a script to simulate basic falling physics when fruits is sliced
Set up guidelines and a world map placement helper tool for artists to fully utilize spritesheets and dynamic batching to optimize draw calls
Jungle Cubes (2014 - 2017)
Company : Playlab
​Release : September 2014​
Genre : Puzzle
Platform : IOS, Android, WebGL
Engine : Unity3D
Team size : 5-10
While Jungle Cubes wasn't as commercially successful as Juice Cubes, I personally preferred its gameplay. Our team worked hard to deliver the best visuals possible for this game.
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Highlights :
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Developed and implemented dynamic UI to universally support any device aspect ratio, predating the introduction of nGUI and uGUI
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Expanded my expertise in shaders and VFX, developing more complex effects and learning techniques such as stencil buffer, depth buffer, and blend operations. I also began incorporating 3D polygon mesh into the game
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Performed all technical artist routines, including creating helper scripts, technical prefabs, and optimization tasks
Sample of gameplay footage showcasing hugh graphical improvements over the previous title
Our team's efforts focused on enhancing the game's visuals.
My contributions included developing shaders,
post-processing, some vfx and troubleshooting
Dynamic UI system to support all possible aspect ratios, including web versions, before nGUI and uGUI were available