The Work:
MOONDO game was the first MMOG created in Israel - by small games startup: FUNTACTIX. Company's principal founder - Ilan Greicer - invited me to take role of an Art Director, with tasks ranging from art directing and producing - to game's prototyping, UX, previs, and co-creating the game design & design documents.
To improve the pipeline for 3D assets creation, I created project structure and designed/organized creative workflow for art department. As soon as flow was resolved, I co-designed 3 game levels/arenas, created storyboards and co-created concept art for 4 levels/environments.
Working with small - but amazing team of artists, I co-designed and prototyped new process for level design, made additions to the new gameplay, UX & UI, visual effects, and prototyped cameras positioning for gameplay - using Anark Studio 3D prototyping/authoring tools. Most of my time - I conducted and supervised art & deliverables for 3D & 2D game assets.
Interesting to know:
Of course - it was the first MMOG game title to be ''Made in Israel'', and we all knew we'll have to invent things on the fly! Ilan Greicer - co-founder of FUNTACTIX - had very clear vision about this game - as he predicted that ''Game Market will be rulled by top-down view multiplayer online battle arena game''! His vision was right on the money, as years later - tremendous success of Riot Games' ''League Of Legend'' proved he was 100% on the spot!
And so - our MOONDO was an early attempt to head in "League of Legends'' direction, and one of the world's first games to introduce single-avatar gameplay - for multitude of games.
Highlights:
While leading the team of 7 Israel's leading game artists, I also served as ''communication bridge'' between art and programming departments, and have created novel pipeline for rapid iterations to accelerate the production. With great team of creatives, we organized art improvement process via scrum, and fun internal brainstorming - tripling the production efficiency, and elevating art output to quality levels of much larger teams.
Introducing some cinematic solutions into the game's creative set - we established blueprint for elevating the emotional impression of casual game - to get closer to that of AAA titles, produced by much larger teams. To our best knowledge - MOONDO was one of the first games to create cinematic cut-scenes from within actual real-time 3D game-play!
The Team:
The amazing team of FUNTACTIX artists doing this pioneering work were: Ilan Greicer, Oren Shved, Eliya Tsuchida, Limor Shani, Asaf Sela, Arik Boaz, and Amir Dror. Game-design co-authors were Amir Lotan, Ilan Greicer, and Yaron Leifenberg - all co-founders of the company. Programming power were Roy Chemo, Yaron Leifenberg, and Mati Yanko. IT master and web-master: Alex Tavor. Game Production Angel: Maia Goldstein. Online Community Manager who interfaced our work with players and greatly assisted us to improve the game - was Doron Nir. Operations Manager Fairy: Tali Shavit. I hope everyone still remembers our weekly ''Beer@Beach Brainstorms''! : )
Achieved:
Beta version of this pioneering multi-player game - attracted wide first-user base in Israel, and secured the second round of investments - led by JVP - Jerusalem Venture Partners. JVP was the first VC fund having clear goal to place Israel's entertainment industry startups on the world's map.
FUNTACTIX was acquired in 2016 by Playtech - to expand it's Casual Games Division, and was re-branded as FTX Games.
