Simon Cooper

veteran game artist

Working in games since 1997

Experienced in all aspects of game art production

Over the years I have been an artist, animator, mentor, teacher and leader

About

Simon Cooper

Some of my fondest memories from childhood involve video games. Not just playing them. I can remember taking turns with my sister to type in programs published in Computer and Video Games magazine into our Commodore Vic-20. Now looking back it seems inevitable that I would find a career in games development.
However, it took a few twists and turns before I arrived in games: working in theatre, illustration and multimedia before I got my first job as an animator in London. Since then I have hugely enjoyed the process of creating art for video games.
My fascination with swiftly-evolving technology has helped me to be a conduit between the art, design and code teams on several projects. Over the years I have also embraced the challenge of helping to build art teams and lead them through some tough, but rewarding production cycles resulting in many published titles.
I have also had the opportunity to pass on my development experience through teaching, helping aspiring new artists launch their careers in the games industry.
But games always draw me back and my passion remains video game production. It is still a thrill seeing a game idea evolve and develop into a published title. Having a hand in that process seems to be what I do best.

Software Experience

Photoshop

27 years

3D Studio Max

23 years

Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere)

16 years

Unity3D

8 years

Substance Designer

8 years

Substance Painter

2 years

ZBrush

6 years

... plus a lot of other packages I've used along the way like MS Office, Visual Studio, Maya and Blender. Too many to list here.

Current Work

Lead Artist for Travian Games

I joined Travian Games as Lead Artist on their new freemium MMO build and raid game called Arkheim: Realms at War at the beginning of 2017.

I have been working with a small but hugely talented team and I'm immensely proud of what we have achieved so far in such a short space of time for such an enormous game.

To achieve the high level of quality and quantity of artwork required for the project we produced key artwork and content in-house while using the leverage of outsourcing. This required careful and close collaboration with our outsource partners to get the outcome we were all striving for.

Take a look at the video below for more insight. I'm the English fella, talking about the art production.

What my colleagues have to say

"The best thing about Simon is how generous he is with this knowledge. In the many years I’ve worked with him, his teams have always been engaged and have developed their own skills tangibly."

Jaid Mindang

Art Director, Travian Games

"...he is kind, easy to work with and always has an ear to listen to every member of his team and their concerns. He doesn’t micro-manage and trusts and helps every person to do the best that they can."

Starrla Lares

Art Outsource Manager at Aspyr Media

"Simon was a calm, guiding presence between artists, animators, coders and producers and was responsible for the smoothest and most creative working environment I ever had in my 14 years in the industry."

Paschal McGuire

AR Engineer at Infogain@Facebook

Past work

During my time as a freelancer I produced a set of assets for sale on the Unity Asset Store. You can see a promo displaying them in the above video. The asset pack features a modular set of components for constructing rooms and corridors in a Sci-Fi style. It also has a working elevator system.

If you would like to walk around the demo scene in a browser window try this link. The scene will load in a new tab in your browser using Unity’s WebGL deployment. Performance will vary, depending on how new or powerful your graphics card is. I recommend you only try it if you are using a desktop PC or Mac and you have a dedicated graphics card.

The camera is first person. Movement is with WADS or the cursor keys and the camera view rotates with the mouse. Classic FPS controls!