PortfolioGen — SEAFROG

TYLER MAITLAND - Portfolio

Hi, my name is Tyler Maitland. With over 13 years of experience in the games industry, I’ve worn many hats—from animator to game designer to level designer and consider myself a true 3D generalist.

Four years ago a personal passion project, Seafrog, evolved into a full-time endeavor after securing a publisher, ultimately leading to the incredible milestone of shipping my own game. Now, with that lifelong dream realized, I’m excited to bring both creative vision and hands-on production experience to new projects and collaborations.

RÉSUMÉ

Seafrog is a 2.5D action-puzzle-platformer mixed with movement that was inspired by skateboarding. It was primarily built by myself and a colleague programmer with help from contractors along the way. My responsibilities were all things art related including directing, game design, art, animation, rigging, modeling, shaders, and level design.

Developing Seafrog allowed me to strengthen my 3D generalist skills in every area and gave me great experience in managing small teams. I oversaw the end-to-end asset production pipeline of the entire game and what my small team was not able to handle, I would pick up and do myself. During it’s four year production I touched every visual aspect of Seafrog. Check out the trailer and assets I personally made below:

In addition to managing contractor work, I personally created many of the assets for Seafrog, handling the entire pipeline from concept through modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, shaders, and VFX.

Thirteen years ago animation brought me into game development and with over 15 years of professional experience animating it’s still one of my favorite aspects of making a game.

With a strong background in 3D animation I often prototype mock-ups of game mechanics or level designs to show exactly how something could function in Maya. I find this to be a quick and effective way to communicate a mechanic as well as control pacing before touching any code.

In this example I came up with a battle system for the game, Teeny Titans & it’s sequel Teen Titans Go Figure! The bar fills showing how much resource the player has and what abilities they can afford versus their opponent.

The upside was the player didn’t need to be able to read numbers to compare resources against ability costs which fit well with the younger demographic the game was targeted for.

Another feature I wanted to showcase in this mock-up was the vertical format of the game. I knew mobile games did better if users didn’t have to rotate their devices to play. I developed this split screen system that allowed two cameras to merge into one, keeping the big action moments of attacking full screen but also allowing the player to see large animated figures facing each other as they idled.

MOCK-UP

Made in Maya + After Effects

FINAL

Made in Unity

MOCK-UP

Made in Maya + After Effects

FINAL

Made in Unity

With the same game series I also had the opportunity to pitch the idea of making Jump City in full 3D and triggering time based events.

The player could swipe directions to auto run the character through the streets learning alternate paths and shortcuts in order to reach a sale before it expires.