John Costello

John Costello
Advanced Diploma of Professional Game Development (Game Art and Animation)

John is a highly respected technical artist.  Usually technical art includes rigging and other hard things, and for this project, John created the VFX in 2D and put the game together behind the scenes.  There was a LOT of behind the scenes work to do.

There are 918 backgrounds made by photographing from 918 different cameras, each with one of 158 different lighting settings, and props turned on and off.

As soon as John came on the project, he got us organised.  He put all the backgrounds in game on his very first day!

Look at these layers!  John had to make 7 layers of cutouts of the tables in the Great Hall, so villagers could sit on them.  (The messy numbers were written in by Kathy.)

Then came the audio check.  There are 5,760 pieces of dialogue in the game, and who was the lucky person who got to check them?

With team members jumping in and out of the project scenes and the project programs, it could have been a disaster, but John created a check in / out sheet which we were very careful to use!

But even though we couldn't have managed without him, the parts I liked best were the VFX John created for the game.

John said his favourite visual effect was the lightning put out by the witch's Red Orb.

John interviewed with co-3D-artist Riley Hanlin about what it was like to work on Frog's Princess.  Maybe not a fun experience...

John displays his art at https://www.artstation.com/thall