Co-development and work for hire
Art, design and code for your game.
We’re a small studio in Middlesbrough making our own game, and we take on work for other studios alongside it. You talk to the people doing the work from the first email, and everything on this page was made by one of them.
Client work stays confidential, so everything shown here comes from Out of Water or from the team’s own portfolios, and each piece is credited to the person who made it. Click a piece to see it bigger.
Concept art
Characters, creatures, props and places, drawn to explain how something plays as well as how it looks.
We design for the team that has to build it. A board shows the pose, the states it moves through in game and the pieces a 3D artist needs, so the model can be started from the sheet rather than from a conversation.
- Exploration, thumbnails and fast iteration
- Character, creature, costume and prop design
- Turnarounds and construction sheets ready to model from
- Motion tests for anything that moves or opens
Stylised 3D
Environments, props and characters with clear shapes and a lot of personality.
Chunky silhouettes, hand-painted materials and budgets that survive a real frame rate. We build modular kits so a level can be dressed from a palette, and hero pieces for the places a player stops and looks.
- Blockout and greybox dressing through to final art
- Modular environment kits and hero props
- Stylised characters and creatures
- Game-ready assets for Unity or Unreal
Hard surface
Vehicles, weapons and mechanical props, modelled accurately from reference.
Clean topology, careful panel work and materials that hold up when the camera gets close. Garrett came to games from realistic vehicle art, so cars in particular are home ground.
- Vehicles from blockout to showroom render
- Weapons, helmets and mechanical hero props
- High to low bakes with predictable topology
- PBR materials authored in the Substance tools
Design and code
Level design, game and narrative design, and gameplay programming.
We build levels from blockout to scripted polish in Unity and Unreal, write gameplay code in C#, and write the words characters say. A lot of what we know about feel comes from tuning two very different animals to share one screen.
- Level design in Unity and Unreal
- Gameplay programming in Unity (C#), including enemy AI and player systems
- Local multiplayer and split screen
- Narrative design, dialogue and barks
- Profiling and performance passes
How it works
No account managers and no long onboarding. It usually goes like this.
You write to us
A paragraph about what you need is plenty. If it’s sensitive, say so, and we’ll sign your NDA before you tell us any more.
We scope it together
A call to agree what gets made, by when, and for how much. You get a written quote: fixed-price milestones or a day rate, whichever suits your production.
We start small
We suggest a paid trial first, like one prop, one concept or one level blockout, so you can judge the fit before committing to more.
We work in your pipeline
Your engine, your tools, your task board. One point of contact, and progress you can see every week rather than only at milestones.
Three shapes of work
| Shape | What it looks like | Good when |
|---|---|---|
| Extra hands | One or two of us for a few weeks, on a defined batch of assets or a single feature. | You know exactly what’s missing, or you want a trial before anything bigger. |
| A package | A self-contained piece of the game from start to finish: a prop kit, a character set, a level, a concept pass. Quoted up front and delivered against milestones. | You want a whole chunk of the game taken off your plate. |
| Embedded | A small crew across art, design and code, in your stand-ups and your build, on a rolling monthly basis. | You need capacity across a production, not one gap filled. |
Pricing is per project, once we’ve talked. We’d rather quote properly on a real brief than publish a rate card that fits nobody.
What we work in
Unity and Unreal Engine 5, and the tools the art team already lives in. If your pipeline has habits of its own, we’ll learn them.
- Unity
- Unreal Engine 5
- C#
- Blender
- Maya
- ZBrush
- Substance 3D Painter
- Substance 3D Designer
- Photoshop
- Procreate
Questions
Is my project too small?
Probably not. A single prop or one concept sheet is a perfectly good first job, and it’s how we’d suggest starting anyway.
Will you sign an NDA?
Yes, and before you share anything you’d rather keep quiet. It’s also why you won’t find any client work on this page.
How do you price work?
After scoping, either as fixed-price milestones or as a day rate, depending on how your production runs. You’ll have it in writing before anything starts.
Which engines do you work in?
Unity and Unreal Engine 5. Our own game is in Unity 6, so that’s where most of our gameplay code lives, and our level designers work in both.
Where are you, and when are you around?
Middlesbrough, in the North East of England, on UK time. We work with you in whatever you already use, whether that’s Slack, Discord or Teams.
What if what I need isn’t listed?
Ask anyway. Between the team and the collaborators we work with regularly there’s a fair chance we know someone, and if it isn’t us, we’ll say so.
Got something in mind?
Tell us what you’re making and what you’re short of. We’ll come back with an honest answer, even if the answer is that you don’t need us.