Playing through my completed game project in my home workspace while showcasing performance data in Excel as well as some screenshots of my shader work
Author: Benjamin Edens | Major: Computer Science | Semester: Spring 2025
My name is Benjamin Edens, and I recently graduated from the University of Arkansas College of Engineering with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. During the 2024-2025 academic year, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. David Fredrick from the World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (WLLC) department on a project exploring technical art workflows in the Unity game engine to assist other students and independent game developers who have limited experience in this area. Technical art (tech art) is a field that combines aspects of both computer science and art and is integral in determining how elements of a game are rendered to the player’s screen in order to produce a specific visual style. Though I am not immediately pursuing a career in tech art after college due to the current industry conditions, my ultimate career goal is to become a technical artist within video games, and this project was my first step on that journey.
The modern social and economic impact of video games cannot be overstated. However, recent shifts in the video game industry have led to massive layoffs and high unemployment rates, leaving many industry professionals to either change career fields or resort to independent (indie) development, which lacks the resources and skill diversity available to large game companies. Student game developers may also find indie development to be the most viable career option as well. As such, I wanted to gain personal experience with the technical aspects of creating video game visuals and graphics while documenting an approach for a particularly popular visual style so that others with limited experience can recreate or build upon my work for this project and use it in their own game projects. This work is also useful to other students at the University of Arkansas who are interested in game design, as there are still very limited opportunities to study in this field through the currently available curriculum.
The inspiration for this research came from taking an Honors Colloquium course on game design with Dr. Fredrick. Upon discussing my interest in both computer science and digital art with Dr. Fredrick, he explained to me the role of a technical artist, someone who bridges the gaps in skill and understanding between game programmers and artists. Since this role resonated with my interests, Dr. Fredrick helped me plan a project in which I could gain practical experience relevant to a career in this field.
My thesis project was about creating a small game in Unity to gain exposure to the workflows used by a tech artist and test whether my implementation was feasible to play with reasonable performance on everyday computers. In particular, I tried to implement a cel shaded anime style, which gives 3D objects and environments the appearance of 2D celluloid animation like what is seen in Japanese anime. This is a style of growing prominence in video games, and I hoped to document my implementation process through my thesis to help other students or independent developers who also want to use this style but lack the technical background to do so. My primary hope for this project was to gain practical knowledge and experience through the work, and I believe I was able to do so through both the successes and the challenges I encountered.
The main challenge I faced was a lack of time. Despite nearly a year of pre-learning and preparation through online courses and video tutorials as well as another year spent working on the project, the wide array of skills required as a tech artist take time and experience to develop properly. For this project, I worked on 3D modeling, texturing, character rigging and animation, scene lighting, level design, shader development, and performance optimization. Though I did gain valuable insight into each of these areas, developing all of these skill sets on my own limited the overall scope of each piece within the final project. If I were to do the project again, I would probably focus in more on a smaller subset of these workflows to develop them more fully. Though I had initially hoped I would have enough time to create a fully polished game, I struggled to finish on time and had to make decisions about which parts to spend less time on or cut completely. My lack of experience in this field caused me to overestimate how quickly the project I had envisioned could be completed. However, dealing with such an unfortunate situation is a skill of its own – one that is all too necessary within game development.
This is where Dr. Fredrick’s guidance was especially useful. He helped me to decide which aspects of my game were most vital to the success and visual appeal of the final product and kept me on track to wrap up the work on time. Despite not being specifically trained as a technical artist himself, Dr. Fredrick has a good grasp on the general processes and principles of the discipline and was thus able to judge my progress quite effectively and provide timely advice on how certain aspects could be improved. We met approximately every two weeks and sometimes more frequently to go over my progress and determine how best to move forward. Dr. Fredrick was also always encouraging and continually helped me to keep making progress whenever I got bogged down in the details, and I am extremely grateful for his support.
I had originally planned to attend graduate school at Purdue to study computer graphics after graduation, but due to problems securing funding, I have decided to pursue a more traditional career path in IT or software development for the time being. However, I still plan to continue developing my game design and tech art skill sets in my free time and hope to do some indie game development of my own in the future.