GIOVANI MAGANA

Giovani Magana is an Environment Artist and World Builder with nine years of professional experience in the game industry, contributing to three major AAA titles. He specializes in creating detailed, immersive assets and environments through modular design, terrain blending, and narrative-driven world building, balancing artistic vision with technical workflows. He collaborates closely with design, lighting, and technical art teams to ensure high-quality results and is seeking to advance into a senior role where he can mentor other artists.

At Respawn Entertainment, he served as Senior Environment Artist on Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, building eight complete environment levels while optimizing performance and gameplay. He mentored a junior artist, created a reusable rock asset library using Houdini, ZBrush, and Maya, and authored photorealistic textures with Substance Designer, ZBrush, and Gaea. At Sony Santa Monica Studio, he contributed to six levels and two cinematic environments for God of War: Ragnarök, transforming designer blockouts into modular kits, creating high-quality textures, and optimizing levels with LODs, shadow proxies, and simplified meshes, while maintaining close cross-departmental communication.

Earlier, at Skydance Interactive, he worked on The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, a VR-first survival game, creating architectural elements, destroyed structures, hero weapons, unique props, and immersive set dressing. He optimized VR performance through texture consolidation, atlases, and reduced draw calls to maintain stable 90 FPS gameplay.

Beyond production, he has taught environment art at Escena for three years and produced video series for the Gnomon School of Visual Effects, sharing expertise in modular asset creation, visual storytelling, and integration of art with gameplay. His career demonstrates a combination of technical mastery, creative storytelling, leadership through mentorship, and a commitment to education within the game industry.