ADAM WATTS

Game Designer & Artist

Hello! My name is Adam and I’m a Designer and Art Director at Nucleolus. I hold a First Class Honours Degree in Games Design & Art from the University of Southampton.

Below you can find my portfolio highlighting some of my work within the industry.

Professional Work

About The Amblios Club

01 / 2022 - Present

The Amblios Club is a companion app for kids eye care consisting of interactive games and exercises that help children complete their daily eyepatch time. The app was designed with the help of orthoptists and ophthalmologists in order to form good treatment habits within kids, to keep them motivated to wear their eyepatch every day. The Amblios Club utilises AI based technology that checks to see if children are wearing their eyepatch whilst using the app.

Roles and Responsibilities:

General Game Design

  • Designed three of the four games hosted within the app, staring with research which led to the creation of game design documents.

  • Worked closely with our programmers to make sure gameplay matched the gameplay I designed.

Art and Animation

  • Developed the art style featured within the app. Leading the artistic direction of the app.

  • Designed and created all of the assets within the game side of the app (background art, foreground, obstacles, characters).

  • Created all of the animations within the app.

Post Production Work

  • Produced, edited and directed marketing material for crowdfunding (this includes, but is not limited to: creating assets and producing a gameplay trailer, interviewing ophthalmologists and turning said footage into a medical explanation video discussing amblyopia.

About Mayor Mayhem

05 / 21 - 07 / 21

Mayor Mayhem is a democracy simulation game which aims to support future democratic participation. Players take on the role of a local government representative, implementing local laws whilst seeing how their decisions impact their voters. Mayor Mayhem exists to offer players a simulated space to learn and experiment. The game is based on a sophisticated mathematical theory that simulates an in-depth population including their political beliefs and other variables such as health / status.

Roles and Responsibilities:

Research

  • Style research for game setting, starting with scene mock ups, time setting research and ending in a design document for the style.

Art and Animation

  • Creation of all 3D assets used in the background, including textures applied to those models.

  • Production of scene transition animations, created and rendered in Blender.

About Avian

04 / 20 - 03 / 21

Avian is a co-operative multiplayer game with a strong focus on conservation, collaboration, and altruism at is core. The player must explore large landmasses that levitate in the sky, as they try to build up and help their community thrive. Whether its flying through the sky to help polinate the islands below, or negotiating with neighbours to share resources at a balanced cost, each mode of gameplay helps contribute to the fundamental belief of colaboration, repair and growth.

Roles and Responsibilities:

Level Design

  • Designed many of the scenes within the world, starting with a narrative background for their purpose, which evolved into concept art.

  • Worked closely with the project lead and the lead artist to create a rich and diverse world.

Art and Animation

  • Modelled and textured many pf the environmental and architectural scenes within the game.

  • Created 3D animated background wildlife to populate the world.

Other Projects

Dons Through the Ages

02 / 21 - 05 / 21

This proof-of-concept prototype is a blend of Machine Learning and smart adaptive gameplay mixed with AR technology in order to allow players to recreate historically based penalty shoot outs with famous Wimbledon FC goalkeepers.

What Came After?…

01 / 22 - 02 / 22

This in house project aimed to explore environmentalism and the impact of deforestation through the lens of a supernatural protagonist. This was a short one man project that has currently been put on pause and has gone through multiple stages of iterations.

The Astera Project

Starts 06 / 2023

Astera is an ongoing project within the University of Southampton. Initially starting as a comsological visual tool, Astera will soon become gamified to instead focus on the evolution of galaxies at the hands of an all powerful player. Project starting June 2023.

University Work

Whilst at university I played many different roles across multiple projects throughout the years. During my first two years of university many of the projects were brief, the longest lasting two months. However, in my final year we were tasked with designing a project in our first semester and collaborating to build the most popular ideas in the second semester. During my final semester I worked on a project called Jazz & Azul with one other member of my class. My role in this project was to design and model the environment and characters, and help expand the world in the narrative. If you click on the banner above, you will be taken to a page dedicated to this final project.

Personal Work

The following work has been produced over the years, with most of the traditional artwork dating back to my time in sixth form. A lot of the work has been carried out in my free time, with the intention of honing skills, learning new techniques or simply with the hope of trying something new! Although most of my professional work is digital art, whether that be through 3D modelling, concept art, or illustration, my routes have always originated through traditional art such as painting, drawing or creating largescale art installations. This section serves to show how my art has evolved over the years, however it also remains an area for me to show what new skills I am currently developing and working on.

3D modelling is my favourite artistic pass time. It was a skill I started learning in 2020, right as I was finishing university. Over the years I have kept returning to this art form in order to practice and upkeep the skills I have taught myself. Whenever undergoing this work, I have tried practicing modelling new things designed in a new art style, based off of other artists concept art and illustrations.

During my second year at the University of Southampton, I joined a life drawing class. It was here that I tried drawing for the first time in years! Some of these drawings were completed in these sessions, others were done in my free time outside of class. For me it was a nice change of pace, which allowed me to learn and practice drawing the human form, and gave me an opportunity to try my best at capturing details.

It’s been a few years since I last painted; many of the pieces you can see here were completed as a project before I started university. However, one or two paintings were completed during my first year back in 2018. Painting wasn’t initially my specialty, and was something I only started in sixth form. Up until that point most of my art work focused primarily on creating detailed installations based around multiple themes. However, its something I’ve come to enjoy and still continut to do today.

Skills

3D Art

  • Environmental Modelling

  • Character Rigging / Animating

  • Sculpting

  • Unwrapping

  • Texturing

Digital / Traditional Art

  • Character concept art

  • Environmental concept art

  • Character Sprite sheets

  • 2D animation

  • Painting

Game Design

  • Level Design

  • Puzzle Design

  • Narrative Design

  • World Building

  • Gamification

Research

  • Usability design & testing

  • Event hosting

  • Research & data analysis

  • Market analysis

Software & Tools

Art

  • Procreate

  • Krita

  • Blender

Game Engines

  • Unity 3D

Design & Production

  • Adobe After Effects

  • Audacity

  • Miro