Garden Tails | ashleyfarlow

Garden Tails is the first Match-3 based mobile game developed at Dots. The premise of the game is to play match-3 like gameplay to earn currency to help purchase and plant gardens. As the gardens fill up, animals arrive and bring an interesting narrative to the game. This game is geared towards a casual audience, with an expected release date of September 2022 on the Apple Arcade.

During this project I was the 3D Lead Artist/Supporting Art Director. I not only managed the visual vision of the 3D spaces, but I also collaborated with the Art Director working as Supporting Art Director, 3D team, other artists, game designers and developers to bring it to life. Some of my core responsibilities included Supplemental Art Direction, 3D Animation, Animation + Modeling Supervising, Rigging, Team Management, 3D modeling, Texturing, Concepting, and Storyboarding.

Some of the biggest challenges when working on this project revolved around optimization and performance. This game originally began development in 2019, and we quickly ran into the question "How can we support low end phones while also providing some of the graphics we wished to achieve as a heavy foliage based mobile game?" With the ever changing game design and market testing we had to not only move forward with creating new assets but go back and make adjust the finished assets to match what was asked of from the game design leads.

ANIMALS

Goose Walk

Deer Tap Animation

SnakeMove

Bunny Jump

Bird Idle Animations

TanukiJump

Chameleon Tap Animation

TurtleJump

RoosterWhat

ShimaFly

ParadiseFlyCatchJump

Deer Idle

ArmadilloBall

ArmadilloWalk

HornedLizardIdle

HornedlizardWalk

KitFoxIdle

KitFoxJump

HorseWalk

HorseIdle

PronghornIdle

PronghornScared

RoosterCall

RoosterWalk

SquirrelIdle

SquirrelJump

Bunny Run Cycle

Bunny Idle

LemurWalk

Fox Idle

Fox Idle Sit

Fox Walk Cycle

CraneEat

CoyoteWalk

CoyoteHowl

BuckTap

BuckItch

ZebraLizardStretch

ZebraLizardIdle

ZebraLizardWalk

RoadRunnerMove

RoadRunnerIdle

RoadRunnerJump

Chameleon Idle

SnakeSLSSS

XoloWalk

TurtleIdle

TurtleWalk

TanukiIdleSit

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GARDENS

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Behind the Scenes

In this section I want to show some context of thought, design, and production process. Everything in this section is meant to showcase exactly how the work was created. The work below is not indicative of final product.

First I would like to showcase a guide book I made for the team. This book is over 100+ pages long and details every step to make the art for the game. I wanted to make sure that the art team were all on the same page, all put in their input and valuable knowledge, and had a place to reference if needed. New team members could also be onboarded quicker. This guide was very helpful and increased our productivity, team members loved using the guide. Team members also found themselves able to focus on their work more and not being blocked by any issues, especially technical issues. Looking back on the guide I would probably do the individual processes different and more efficient (using better rigging and animating tools, amplify shader, etc).