View on Itch.io: https://www.twine.net/signin

View Character Model: https://www.twine.net/signin

In the fall of 2025, I acted as the lead character and creature designer for a collaborative project working within a team to create a small game called Reel Rhythm. Published in December of 2025, my primary task was to handle the full and complete production of Jordy, the player character, as well as each of the collectable fish. Reel Rhythm was created in Unreal Engine, with the most helpful contributions of my team to help realize the project.

Jordy’s model was initially sculpted in Z-brush, and then later retopologized in Autodesk Maya, optimized for animation in mind. He was later rigged and animated in Maya, and textured using Substance painter, using the high poly sculpt as a baked normal map, with additional manual adjustments made as needed. Much love and effort was put into Jordy, and I thoroughly enjoyed expressively animating his body, my favorite part being the belly jiggles added through a custom Maya bone and controller setup. The fishing pole object was modeled by our team’s prop artist, and I designed the custom rig and animated the object’s movement. The animations were designed with Jordy’s gameplay in mind, with the reeling animation designed to loop for as long as the player is engaged with the fishing minigame. Similar choices were made for the rest of the animations.

His design went through a few iterations before it was finalized in order for him to best fit in with the world and match the chosen artistic style. Notably, Jordy is left handed, and his design incorporates lots of subtle asymmetry to make him a more memorable character.​

5 unique fish models were created as game assets for the Reel Rhythm project. Each was initially given concept art drawn in Paint Tool Sai after significant research on the anatomy of each of the fish species chosen, as well as fish as animals in general.

Each model was first sculpted using Z-Brush, then retopologized in Maya, and textured using Substance Painter. The textures created were designed with versatility and adjustability in mind, and thus derivative variant texture sets were easily edited and altered to produce the skins for various species in a streamlined and efficient manner.​