Grant Roberts

Hello! I'm Grant Roberts, currently serving as the Art Director of Gaming at Pixel Vault, a multimillion-dollar "heavy hitter" in the Web3 space. I also direct operations at the Art Work House, a ~1,500 - member community designed to foster, train, and empower talented new artists looking to break into artistic careers.

Over my career, I've had the pleasure of working with game studios, capital funds, DAOs, crypto ventures, and private clients across a wide range of backgrounds. My work has spanned game development, visual development of new IP's, visual storytelling, illustration, and even immersive VR experiences. I've excelled at an array of roles covering nearly every aspect of a visual development pipeline, and have learned a ton from the brilliant teams I've worked with along the way.

My creative drive thrives in challenging environments, where I excel at solving visual and technical challenges with a straightforward, collaborative approach. I have a reputation for leveraging new, cutting-edge tools, and can rapidly adapt myself and my team to tackle even the most unique and complex problems.

After my planned transition from Webaverse, one of my contacts reached out to me to pitch an interesting indie project in the Web3 space, called 0VOID. It is a small team of extremely talented artists with a huge vision, and after hearing their pitch, I told them I would be happy to come onboard for a limited scope to help them get things off the ground and running smoothly.

I acted in a blended role, providing key concepts, advice on pipeline setup and management, and a degree of art direction, dialing in on how to achieve their very unique aesthetic and how best to leverage it to tell the story they envisioned.

• Assisted in getting working pipelines set up with Ethical AI-enabled workflows to suit a smaller production team
• Helped guide the design of characters through the creation of key concept art and style guidelines
• Provided artistic and technical advice on 2D and 3D pipelines, and assisted in the creation of custom workflows designed for their specific artists and goals

As AD at Webaverse, my position shifted a bit from lead concept. Generally, I maintained the deadlines, projects, and team assignments - both for our in-house teams as well as outsourcing studios. Creation and maintenance of an Art Bible, as well as user-side documentation and guidelines for getting user-created content into the engine and editing existing assets also fell to me. I created all the key concepts for new ideas, characters, and environments, and I also gave artistic direction to all visually-based teams, including the UI team, social media team, technical artists, and shader artists, in addition the the core art team of 2d and 3d artists.

• Researched, developed, and implemented new Ethical AI-based workflows for faster iteration and visual development
• Tracked, scheduled, and managed an ongoing and ever-changing list of projects, priorities, and teams
• Directly oversaw and art directed the assets for a genesis pass drop that achieved over 4,000 ETH in total volume over a 2-week time period
• Learned and adapted to new forms of visual media to allow for tailored art direction

I had the wonderful opportunity to work with Webaverse as Lead Concept, helping to bring to life the characters and environments in a dynamic, community-driven story. Webaverse presented some interesting challenges, blending together the older style of games such as Sonic and the early Legend of Zelda games with an experimental, cutting-edge backend that was in development even as we were working on the game for it.

• Developed a wide range of ideas, including the core cast of characters and a number of environments and biomes
• Adapted to a unique pipeline for a non-standard, in-development game engine
• Worked closely with the 3D team and directors to unify a wide range of disparate "puzzle pieces"
• Replicated a number of different art styles as we made references and homages to other well-known games and players in the space
• Helped to create a general styleguide for art assets and UI

I had the opportunity to work with Tjoeker, an indie studio making a very ambitious airline simulator game. The Airline Project: Next Gen offered some very interesting challenges, and I had to draw on everything I knew as I did concept art, UI design, illustration work, and technical art. My favorite challenge was to create the game map. We were pulling real-world data to populate the locations of airports and airlines, which meant we needed a game map that was stylized, but matched a satellite image within an error margin of a few pixels. I did concepts for the map design, created a workflow to tackle the issue, and overpainted a full satellite map of the world by hand, stylizing it and bringing it in the direction we chose. The result was a beautiful, extremely accurate map which I still consider a huge accomplishment.

• Flexed out of my 'comfort zone' to fill various roles as needed
• Developed numerous custom workflows to tackle complex projects in a streamlined and consistent manner
• Worked closely with the dev team to harmonize the art assets and the gameplay loop"
• Helped to plan and execute a marketing strategy, complete with assets for use on social medias, blogs, and fundraising sites

I’ve had the amazing opportunity throughout my freelance career to work with some amazing clients, ranging from individuals working on passion projects to indie studios with big ideas. I love the challenges presented by a tight deadline, tricky technical or budget requirements, or evolving project goals, and I take pride in my ability to roll with the punches and produce consistently impressive results where others have struggled. I’ve also had the unique chance to expand my visual library and repertoire due to the remote nature of freelance work, traveling to new places and integrating the new ideas I find there into my workflows and end products.

• Learned and developed skills from every corner of the visual field, including UI/UX design, graphic design, 2D and 3D concepting, illustration, 2D and 3D animation, digital sculpting, asset creation, web development, technical art, art direction, and countless other disciplines.
• Gained a deep understanding of organization, version control, time management, clear and concise communication, and marketing.