METRO AWAKENING
RELEASE: November 7, 2024
PLATFORM: Quest2, Quest3, PC VR, PSVR2
FUNCTION: Art Development Director
Metro Awakening is an ambitious, narrative-driven VR title set within the acclaimed Metro universe. As the Art Development Director, I held a strategic leadership role within the studio’s management group. My focus was on high-level decision-making, refining studio-wide methodologies, and ensuring a cohesive, high-fidelity experience across PC VR, PS VR2, and Meta Quest 2 & 3.
AVERAGE TEAM SIZE: ~95 total, ~32 Artists
ENGINE: Unreal 5
MY CONTRIBUTIONS:
- Strategic Leadership: Served as a core member of the cross-discipline management group, contributing to studio strategy and project-wide decision-making at the highest level.
- Departmental Leadership: Managed and mentored all of the Art Leads on the project. I focused on empowering them to own their sub-disciplines while providing high-level guidance on complex challenges and structural organization to ensure the production pipeline met our delivery standards.
- Methodology Oversight: Pushed for a “proxy-first” workflow for art. A key example was our “proxy-to-performance-capture” process, which used text-to-speech and in-house proxies to validate narrative scenes and technical foundations well before final assets or actor recordings were committed.
- Technical Art Strategy: Provided high-level direction on technical art solutions and performance budgets. This strategy ensured a consistent, atmospheric “Metro” experience across all devices while maximizing the specific hardware capabilities of each platform.
- Parallel Multi-Platform Development: Directed the art team through the challenge of a simultaneous launch on Meta Quest, PS VR2, and PC. By utilizing the mobile hardware as our baseline, we built a rock-solid foundation that we could successfully scale up for high-end platforms within a limited timeline. This was done in close collaboration with tech.
- Outsourcing & Quality Standards: Oversaw the documentation and quality benchmarks for our outsourcing partners, ensuring external assets seamlessly integrated with our internal immersion and performance goals.
INTERESTS & CHALLENGES:
This was the most ambitious project in the studio’s history, requiring a balance between scaling the team and maintaining the high expectations of a world-class franchise. Key challenges included:
- Multidisciplinary Approach: I promoted close collaboration between the Art, Design, and Technical departments. This ensured that every environment was aligned with the narrative flow, gameplay requirements and technical limitations, creating a sense of shared responsibility across the studio.
- Simultaneous Delivery & VR Optimization: Delivering for three distinct platforms at launch meant we could not rely on a porting process. We had to account for the “VR tax” (rendering twice at high frame rates) while maintaining the series’ iconic, atmosphere through creative and methodical optimization.
- Art Departmental Scaling: Acted as a key stakeholder in the recruitment process for art, collaborating with the Art Director and Department Manager on hiring, leveling, and salary decisions for the majority of the art team. I provided the final artistic and technical validation for candidates to ensure our rapidly growing team remained aligned with the project’s production standards.
- Asset Optimization: Adapting existing franchise assets for our VR pipeline required a significant effort. We focused on heavy optimization and re-authoring materials to ensure assets performed efficiently across all platforms while remaining grounded in the world.