HILARY N.
HUSKEY

Origins

Form Forge was created in response to a gap between traditional classroom instruction and the realities of professional digital art and game production pipelines. While students were developing strong individual technical skills through coursework, there were limited opportunities for sustained, collaborative, large-scale production that mirrored industry environments. Form Forge emerged as a solution to bridge that gap through a practice-based, research-driven production model.

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Initially conceived as a sculpting and skill-focused club, Form Forge quickly evolved through iterative questioning: Was this a workshop series? A lecture space? A project? These early explorations led to a deliberate redefinition of the initiative away from isolated skill-building and toward a cohesive production framework. The result was a semester-long production club structured around a single, unified creative research prompt, allowing students to investigate artistic, technical, and collaborative challenges over time

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The core idea behind Form Forge was to treat student production as a form of applied research. Each annual project begins with a carefully constructed concept package that establishes narrative context, mood, and visual direction. Students and alumni then sign up to contribute concept art, hero assets, props, or characters, collectively building toward a fully realized Unreal Engine environment. This structure encourages inquiry into visual cohesion, pipeline consistency, authorship, and the translation of 2D concepts into 3D real-time spaces

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Form Forge also serves as a site of practice-based research and creative effort by foregrounding process, iteration, and reflection as primary modes of inquiry. Participants are encouraged to document decisions, test workflows, respond to critique, and adapt their work within real production constraints. The project allows for investigation into how collaborative pipelines function, how visual and technical systems evolve through distributed authorship, and how mentorship and peer critique shape learning outcomes. In this way, Form Forge positions making not only as skill development, but as a method of research embedded within contemporary digital art and game development practice.

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The 2024 project, The Siren’s Grasp, exemplifies this approach. Rather than functioning as a single artwork, the project served as a shared research space where 30 artists explored environmental storytelling, modular asset design, material language, and atmospheric world-building within a common narrative framework. The collaborative nature of the project allowed participants to study how individual artistic decisions accumulate into a unified environment, and how constraints can foster creative problem-solving

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Leadership and mentorship are embedded into the structure of Form Forge. Team leads oversee asset groups, guide critique, and act as intermediaries between individual contributors and the final integrated scene. This layered mentorship model supports research into peer-led learning, critique culture, and distributed production workflows, while also providing leadership experience for advanced students and alumni

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The semester culminates in a public exhibition and presentation, transforming the project into a form of research dissemination. Concept art, 3D models, Unreal Engine renders, and process documentation are presented alongside awards and juried feedback. This final stage reinforces the idea that the work is not merely extracurricular, but a scholarly and creative output grounded in inquiry, iteration, and reflection

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Through its evolution, Form Forge has become a hybrid space that intersects teaching, creative research, and community engagement. It functions as a living laboratory where students test ideas, document processes, and collaboratively construct digital worlds, positioning production itself as a valid and meaningful form of research.