Vince Cardenas

A student focused on learning how to provide stunning visual effects and exciting animations for games.

Developed Games

IRONRISE 2026

Ironrise 2026 Project @ Red River Polytech

defend, teenies!

Defend, Teenies! 2025 Project @ Red River Polytech

DAMNATION's DESCENT

Damnation's Descent 2025 Project @ Red River Polytech

overstory

Overstory 2024 Project @ Red River Polytech

INFINITE DUNGEON DELVER

Infinite Dungeon Delver 2024 Project @ Red River Polytech

UNREAL | JAN 2026 - APR 2026

DISCLAIMER: Ironrise is a game produced by the students of Game Development at Red River College Polytech. Created as a project within 4 months of development and playtesting. Developed by a small group of 20 students in our final year of the program.Ironrise is a 3D Hack and Slash Sidescroller set in an alternate history where the world is instead full of mechanical, diesel machinery. Fight your way to freedom! Swing your weapons around against the evil corporation that’s preventing your escape.

I developed all VFX related to the game along with helping with a few of the assets and animations. This was such a journey and I'm proud of the work I've made for this project. This project is just the beginning of my road to becoming a VFX Artist and I can't wait to see what more I can discover.

Ironrise 2026 Project @ Red River Polytech

UNREAL VR | SEP 2025 - OCT 2025

Defend, Teenies! is a project I participated in along with 4 other students. It's a VR Game where you command and control tiny little troops and throw them in to the battlefield.Threatened by invading forces that want to plunder their resources and take over their home, the wizards of Teeny Tiny Kingdom have summoned you to command their troops.I worked on the Environment, Lighting and VFX for the game.

Defend, Teenies! 2025 Project @ Red River Polytech

UNREAL | FEB 2025 - APR 2025

Damnation's Descent is a Procedurally Generated RPG.You were sent to the dungeons as punishment. You are determined to try and find an exit despite there only being the ability to traverse downwards to the next floor. Fight your way through the dungeon using a short or long range weapon, defeat enemies, collect items and see how far you can go.I worked on changing sourced Animations to 12FPS and integrating Animations from Mixamo for the game as well as the VFX.

Damnation's Descent 2025 Project @ Red River Polytech

UNITY | OCT 2024 - NOV 2024

This my first collaborated game in the Game Development program. Working with 2 programmers and another fellow artist, I enjoyed developing this game inside the Unity Engine. We heavily referenced Undertale for this game hence the name, 'Overstory'.As you take your daily hike, you stumble and fall down to a patch of flowers surrounded by trees. What will you do next?Overstory is a game where you play as a small lady bug in an unknown forest. After falling, you must find your way out. Beware of monsters that may harm you! But worry not, your small agile frame will keep you safe.I created a majority of the Environment assets as well as the VFX of the game. Creating visuals for the attack patterns of each characters and producing a visually pretty environment.

Overstory 2024 Project @ Red River Polytech

UNITY | SEP 2024 - OCT 2024

This is a solo project that I made in my first year of Game Development. I learned how to code partially in order to develop this game.Infinite Dungeons appeared through out the world, containing tons and tons of treasure for people to collect. You are a Dungeon Delver, in these dungeons you can only stay in them for so long before you get kicked out, which means you must collect as much coins as you can before you leave! The longer you stay in the dungeons, the faster incoming obstacles get, so watch out and don’t lose your coins!

Infinite Dungeon Delver 2024 Project @ Red River Polytech

Resume

Temporarily Hidden

portfolio

Video

ironrise vfx showcase

My work for the project, 'Ironrise'. Made by the graduating class of Red River College Polytech within a 15 week timeline.It's hard not to say it wasn't stressful, but I definitely learned a lot from this project. I had taught myself how to develop these VFX using Unreal's Niagara System while completing the program, and I enjoyed that process.

2025 Demo Reel

This reel contains projects since I've started the Game Development - Art program in Red River Polytech. Starting from late August to end of April.These are personal projects that I was proud of and enjoyed developing.

Video
Video

Animation Reel

These are all my animation works from the Game Development Program in the span of 2 years of studying.

About me

Hello! I'm Vince Cardenas.I like games. More specifically I like RPG games with character building, a LOT. I'd love to make a game like that one day, to be able to create or be part of a community that enjoys theory-crafting, limit testing and finding ways to break games unintentionally.But enough of that, I'm a graduating student of Red River Polytech's Game Development - Art Program. It's a 2 year, 5 semester long program that teaches students the fundamentals and industry expectations of Game Development. I've started to love Animation even more after starting this program because of how awesome it is doing it in 3D. But what I found out is that I absolutely love messing with particle systems in any program.Unreal's Niagara System is very interesting and I think there's so much that can be done with it. Alas, I've only scratched the surface of it by only doing Shader-Based VFX. I'm yet to touch on using Blueprints and creating custom nodes in Niagara. I also have not yet used Cascade.I feel the same about both of Unity's Shuriken and VFX Graph. I only got to mess with Unity's Particle Systems for a semester yet I've learnt how to use it and it was pretty fun!

Projects

!! I'm currently trying to pile the projects I've made for assignments. !!