✩ Game Design ✩

 
How They Got the Job:

  • Came from a variety of backgrounds, but all learned a lot of coding and art
  • All needed traditional art experience at some point in their education
  • Started out more general before focusing on what interested them and specializing

 
Important Job Skills:

  • Being easy to work with is most important
  • Be willing to problem solve
  • Prioritize what's most important and most noticible
  • Be up to date on tech in the industry

 
Life Advice:

  • You can learn from everyone so treat everyone with respect and an open mind
  • Go for a Master's degree before you find a stable job and lose the mindset for education

 
Production Process:

  1. Pre-Production
    • Usually the longest
    • Defines the length of the production process and the budjet
    • Time spent working on patches, bugs, and any DLCs is decided in this step
    • Also decides the art style, story, and game mechanics
  2. Production (alpha)
    • Start creating things not expecting them to work
    • Lots of bugs at this point but only game breaking ones are dealt with
  3. Production (beta)
    • Start refining and polishing things
    • Start dealing with smaller bugs
  4. Final Steps
    • Minimize changes as each change affects other parts of the game
    • Art locks, at a certain point artists are prevented from making further changes
    • Optimze art and VFX to help the game run smoother and faster

 
Workflow:

  1. Concepts: concept artists and producers generate a plan and vision
  2. Concept Design: level designers, game designers, etc. mock up idea and then create the unpolished version
  3. Art: enviroment artists, character artists, etc. polish the previous designs
  4. Lighting & VFX: lighting artists and VFX artists finish polishing the graphics
  • Workflow is organized by how changes affect different jobs (ex. lighting and VFX are the last step because they are affected by changes to the art)
  • This workflow is not as clean in real life, steps are being done in tandem and different steps interact with each other in complicated ways
  • Each change cascades out and affects other things so it's important to focus on making meaningful changes

 
Lighting:

  • One of the presenters was a lighting artist
  • Important to set mood and tone
  • Balencing player experience (visibility, clear what they're supposed to do, etc.) with artistry (composition, mood, etc.)
  • Balencing player experience with realism (ex. lighting things that should be in shadow so it's clearer what the player should do next
  • Difficult to optimize

 
Tech Artist:

  • One of the presenters was a tech artist
  • Create tools and shortcuts to optimize art and streamline art processes
  • Work with lots of different departments

 
Programs Used:

 
Resources: