What do you look for in game artists?
TL;DR: Are you an individual or game studio that has paid an artist to make art for your game? What have you looked for in a candidate?
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I've been quite frustrated with game art courses that try to cover some game programming and game design as well. And I see it almost everywhere. (This isn't a dig at the recent job posting for a lecturer. I've seen the same stuff come out of at least 4 other schools, where their job post asks for a lecturer who has experience in art packages, and in programming, and has some degree/honours/masters, and has industry experience; and where the curriculum seems to cover art, programming and design.) So I'm just trying to figure out why their courses are being structured the way they are, because my feeling is that it's more likely that the schools don't actually have a good understanding of what we're looking for in game artists as an industry, rather than because my personal experience with Luma Arcade/Kerosene/whatever we're called now has been an exception.
My feeling is that game art is an incredibly vast discipline. Making production art for a game can include everything from creating characters to building environments; from painting concept art, promotional illustrations and HUD icons to creating 3D assets; from animation to fx. Especially in our local, smallish teams, a game artist is almost always going to have to be flexible in being able to do almost all of the above at some point. This is already an incredibly large variety of things to cover, especially if they're done to a quality that's ready to ship.
So, given the huge number of different things that a game artist is already likely to have to do in our local teams, I'm quite perplexed as to why so many courses that claim to prepare game artists for our industry feel the need to add game programming and game design to their curriculum. My feeling as that when we look for game artists, we're literally looking for artists who make art for games. We're looking for portfolios that are filled with art that is appealing, that we'd like to see in the games we make. We're looking, to some degree, for art portfolios that are relevant (i.e. we can see wireframes, well-packed UVs, or 2D sprite animations, etc.). We're looking for artists who may have contributed to a game before, and are familiar with delivering art that can easily be plugged into a game engine, like making art for some prototype/project here on MGSA. We're not looking for full-fledged games that artists made themselves. If we wanted that, we'd be hiring game programmers, and favouring people who've got their BSC in Computer Science rather than one year of software training.
(I'm not saying that it's not good for game artists to have familiarity with programming and game design. All knowledge is useful. Being able to code a little is certainly useful. Heck, I've built my career out of being an artist who's comfortable with code. But then my job title is actually "Technical Artist", and I studied a BSC in Maths. And even then, I spend all of my personal-work time making art and honing my art fundamentals because of how vital it is for me whenever I work as a game artist. And when our studio looks for artists, we're looking for people who make great art. Your being able to code is nice, but it's not even listed in the "Pluses" category because of how relatively unimportant it is. For reference, check out our job posting for an artist from last year. It's a pretty good description of what our priorities are when we look for game artists.) My feeling is that when people look for artists, they've already got their bases covered with programmers and designers (and, more often, programmer-designers), and they're really just looking for someone to make art exclusively.
I mean, the only other alternative I can think of is that the schools actually want to prepare students to make their own complete games, and basically go full indie from the start, but I don't really see how that's a viable career path without significant capital, or some other form of income. Have you ever seen a local job post that states that they're looking for a game designer? (I'm not saying courses that focus on "game design" aren't important for our growth as an industry. There's certainly value in the academic study of games and new media. I'm talking more specifically about schools that have non-degree courses whose purpose, according to their own marketing blurbs, is to prepare students for employment in this "highly lucrative career path".)
I basically just want to know if my experience and expectations are somehow the exception. Would you, prospective employers, rather hire an artist who's not a very strong artist but has coded their own game, or someone who's a strong artist but has never coded before? What would you like to see in your ideal candidate?
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I've been quite frustrated with game art courses that try to cover some game programming and game design as well. And I see it almost everywhere. (This isn't a dig at the recent job posting for a lecturer. I've seen the same stuff come out of at least 4 other schools, where their job post asks for a lecturer who has experience in art packages, and in programming, and has some degree/honours/masters, and has industry experience; and where the curriculum seems to cover art, programming and design.) So I'm just trying to figure out why their courses are being structured the way they are, because my feeling is that it's more likely that the schools don't actually have a good understanding of what we're looking for in game artists as an industry, rather than because my personal experience with Luma Arcade/Kerosene/whatever we're called now has been an exception.
My feeling is that game art is an incredibly vast discipline. Making production art for a game can include everything from creating characters to building environments; from painting concept art, promotional illustrations and HUD icons to creating 3D assets; from animation to fx. Especially in our local, smallish teams, a game artist is almost always going to have to be flexible in being able to do almost all of the above at some point. This is already an incredibly large variety of things to cover, especially if they're done to a quality that's ready to ship.
So, given the huge number of different things that a game artist is already likely to have to do in our local teams, I'm quite perplexed as to why so many courses that claim to prepare game artists for our industry feel the need to add game programming and game design to their curriculum. My feeling as that when we look for game artists, we're literally looking for artists who make art for games. We're looking for portfolios that are filled with art that is appealing, that we'd like to see in the games we make. We're looking, to some degree, for art portfolios that are relevant (i.e. we can see wireframes, well-packed UVs, or 2D sprite animations, etc.). We're looking for artists who may have contributed to a game before, and are familiar with delivering art that can easily be plugged into a game engine, like making art for some prototype/project here on MGSA. We're not looking for full-fledged games that artists made themselves. If we wanted that, we'd be hiring game programmers, and favouring people who've got their BSC in Computer Science rather than one year of software training.
(I'm not saying that it's not good for game artists to have familiarity with programming and game design. All knowledge is useful. Being able to code a little is certainly useful. Heck, I've built my career out of being an artist who's comfortable with code. But then my job title is actually "Technical Artist", and I studied a BSC in Maths. And even then, I spend all of my personal-work time making art and honing my art fundamentals because of how vital it is for me whenever I work as a game artist. And when our studio looks for artists, we're looking for people who make great art. Your being able to code is nice, but it's not even listed in the "Pluses" category because of how relatively unimportant it is. For reference, check out our job posting for an artist from last year. It's a pretty good description of what our priorities are when we look for game artists.) My feeling is that when people look for artists, they've already got their bases covered with programmers and designers (and, more often, programmer-designers), and they're really just looking for someone to make art exclusively.
I mean, the only other alternative I can think of is that the schools actually want to prepare students to make their own complete games, and basically go full indie from the start, but I don't really see how that's a viable career path without significant capital, or some other form of income. Have you ever seen a local job post that states that they're looking for a game designer? (I'm not saying courses that focus on "game design" aren't important for our growth as an industry. There's certainly value in the academic study of games and new media. I'm talking more specifically about schools that have non-degree courses whose purpose, according to their own marketing blurbs, is to prepare students for employment in this "highly lucrative career path".)
I basically just want to know if my experience and expectations are somehow the exception. Would you, prospective employers, rather hire an artist who's not a very strong artist but has coded their own game, or someone who's a strong artist but has never coded before? What would you like to see in your ideal candidate?
Comments
That being said, on the odd occasion that we need artists on a contract basis, we would certainly look for someone very specific (i.e. a pixel artists, a character artist, pre-viz artist etc)
One thing I can say for certain, is that any college out there is not capable (retracted, colleges can produce students that are ready for employment right after graduation, but this is still exception and not the norm). In the best case they can produce someone ready for internship, and I think that is where the tension comes in. Your ad outlines someone who would likely already have had quite a bit of work experience, and the time to specialize in one particular area.
Exposing the students to little bits of the pipeline (programming + art) would give them the opportunity to see the bigger picture, making them more useful in the context of an internship (IMO), as well as exposing them to areas they may have an aptitude for.
The animation industry suffers from the same problem. Personally I think it is lack of a bridging structure between tuition and work (e.g. an accountant isn't an accountant after he gets his/her degree, there is a still many years of internship that follow).
(p.s. my background is I started / studied in art + animation , then moved into programming + technical artist and slowly now into bus. dev).
Art Backlog - Hire strict artist
Code backlog - Hire coder
Deadline imminent - Hire all rounder
Small budget - hire all rounder
So I suppose my frustration is that I believe that being industry-ready straight out of school is possible, but that diluting your art time makes it less likely. And I guess the purpose of this thread is to try and figure out how viable the all-rounder path actually is. If we as an industry are actually looking for people who're all-rounders (like, not just art generalists, but literally art+programming+design generalists), more than we're looking for art generalists, then I suppose the schools are much more in touch with what our studios are looking for than I am, and my bad.
I find it really interesting that your team favours technical artists over game artists! Can you elaborate on what your tech artists' responsibilities typically are? And how many technical artists do you actually find? I was under the impression that there are extremely few in the country. I only know of about 4 who work in games. (I know there are many more if you count people who do rigging and node-based shaders for film/advertising, rather than games.)
@Crocopede: Wow, you've hired all of those before? Can you say how often you've hired for each of those roles?
Shader dev (video compositing, chroma keying, full screen effects, and of the usual standard array of materials)
Procedural effects
Codec testing and development (we have our own set of gpu-based video codecs and playback plugins)
Model / texture / lighting optimization to maintain high FPS (we may get given a CAD model of car by a manufacturer).
Working with the design agency to make sure the clients designs are viable on the specced hardware
R&D (e.g. WebGL dev, fixing unity's diacritic rendering so it can render certain non English languages correctly, figuring out how to implement whatever crazy idea the client has, e.g. head tracking)
The reason why we favour tech artists, is that we generally don't get much say in any game art - that gets handled by the agency we work, they make the art - we integrate it.
On the odd occasion we may get the opportunity to do our own art (something I hope to increase in the future)
Right now I have a fairly daunting task of finding TA's and mid/senior dev's in SA that may be available in the foreseable future. Which is why this whole conversation is on interest to me
There's a ton of mistakes that artists who don't have game experience make. Mostly to do with not arranging or formatting or naming their images/models in a way that's usable by a programmer, or just plain not grasping what the task they've been asked to do is or why they'd do it. It takes a fair bit of time (and frustration when the artist isn't technically inclined) to get an understanding of how a game works into them (in my experience).
So I can understand that there is value in familiarizing artists with how games work.
But I wouldn't say it's going to be a core requirement in a candidate for an art job at Free Lives (unless we're specifically hiring a technical artist, and we'd tend to hire 3 non-technical artists for every technical artist).
I think just like @Elyaradine pointed out, a job listing for a game artist at Free Lives is going to look like http://makegamessa.com/discussion/1743/recruiting-3d-game-artist
I guess my question then is. Is there maybe a better way of familiarizing an artist with how games work than teaching them programming?
For instance, if an artist had participated in several game jams (like Ludum Dare or Global Game Jam), or they contributed art to game projects on these forums (or elsewhere), and their art was in games where the art worked, that would be as much indication to me that they were familiar with how games work as being able to program etc.
I think to the credit of the recent City Varsity post (to which I think this thread refers) the students are given some example projects for which to stick their art in. That sort of knowledge is of something that artists are going to be expected to do in a game artist job (at Free Lives), and I'd hope is easier to master than learning to code.
Basically, I see value in the learning coding for an artist at a school, but the I think there might be faster ways to achieve that value (unless I'm missing something) and if Free Lives were to hire a game artist we would be looking for other skills first (just like that "[Recruiting] 3D Game Artist" post).
UNLESS the course is aimed at artists who want to be able to make games by themselves as one manned teams, then there obviously is sense in teaching them the basics of programming. These people do exist (I might have been one of them myself had the course existed when I was studying), but I'd expect these people to be much farther in between.
I'm a bit uncomfortable with talking about specific schools too (unless perhaps it's to say something that they're doing very right). I'm rather torn, because on the one hand I think in many cases students aren't very good at knowing what criteria is important when looking for a good school to learn game art, but on the other I worry about unforeseen ramifications. I don't want to cause people to lose jobs or anything because of something careless that I said. I'd like to push this in more the direction of "This is what employers are looking for when it comes to game artists. If you want to improve your game art course, if you want to make your students more attractive to our industry, then perhaps these are the things you should be focusing on." And I'd ideally like this thread to be evidence of what studios are looking for (though I'm also open to being proven wrong, given that my first-hand experience has only been that of one studio, even though I have plenty of second-hand experience through chatting with friends in the industry elsewhere).
I think starting a dialogue about what South African game companies are looking for is REALLY USEFUL to the colleges. We did have an industry day where Free Lives and some others got to talk to City Varsity about their course (also to City Varsity's credit).
Having said that, I don't know if City Varsity listened to everything we suggested (or that everything we suggested was smart), but it's their responsibility (and the responsibility of other game art colleges) to cater their course to serving the needs of the industry (and so serving their students), and writing threads about what the industry needs makes their jobs easier :)
I graduated from Pxxxxxxx a year ago and all I was taught was how to use sketchup, photoshop,Xsi and 3ds max. As someone who knew what he wanted to do from a young age I could already use photoshop and 3ds max. I would expect from anyone interested in something to already be somewhat familiar with the tools.
Apart from being taught how to use multiple unnecessary 3d software (imo) there wasnt much attention given to creatively develop us to be and think like an artist, instead just showed us how to use the software, which anyone with a internet connection and can figure out in less than a month and then weaved in some practical assignments to complete. The material (and lecturers) was vastly outdated as well.
Never was there any mention of how this or that industry works or how to prepare yourself for that industry and at the end of the course we had to stick all our work which was things varying from architecture to short animations onto an online portfolio and we were cut loose to go get jobs. The only industry experience we got was from Workbased learning.
Maybe the above mentioned are standard, I dont know, but I wasn't pleased with the course at all and it was fxcking expensive.
It was like teaching an Engineer how to use a hammer without showing him the up to date guidelines, best practices and techniques to go about building something.
So I consider myself self taught.
Thats 1 rant to check off my list.
You cannot really make a better artist, that's up to the individuals, however what would be important is optimizing your work so that others can use it, as well as other skills such as efficiency and speed, as well as practice of repeatable assets and differentiating whether or not to implement 2D or 3D (always 2D... )
I see Code on a very similar standard, in that familiarity is more important than hard knowledge and it should be up to the individual to harness knowing more, because with this, there is not really a 'minimal bar of entry' because the more you know, the better, but if you know less it doesn't necessarily lose you a job: because you are an artist.
now this is for the most part the most important because game design doesn't equal programming. it's unfair to assume so. YES most game design will be dictated by programming and that is why knowing 'how it works' will take you further in making a good design, as opposed to proposing the sky without knowing how the sky works.
There's more to say here, but I'll have to visit back and think on it.
Personally; CityVarsity treated me well... but despite a really good lecturer, I only really got where I am due to personal drive, a lot of my classmates got nothing from even the attempts to teach programming.
The other trend is that smaller teams are made up of more generalists and larger more specialists. Seeing as our country has relatively small studios it seems logical that they'd hire generalists over a specialist, specially when there are pipeline dependencies in asset production. concept - modeling - rigging - animation. One answer here ( which does happen ) might be to hire on contract basis.
My view is that specialty teams > generalist teams, but I don't think we have the businesses yet to sustain that kind of work force. From what I can tell only a handful of students graduating actually find their way into work, others go on to study in other fields while others leave the country, it's rough out there competing against artists who have been in the industry already for a few years, bouncing from studio to studio. I heart this. <3 Also to mention here that shipped art has generally gone through multiple iterations, there's a lot of work in that paragraph...
@BlackShipsFilltheSky I wouldn't say you have to single out anyone, but rather to note that if a course places emphasis on software instead of the craft than they probably doing it wrong. As an artist in the Industry it's more valuable to know what makes something look,feel pretty rather than what buttons to push (psst guys you find the buttons in the manual). With software that is ever changing and with the studios in the country all using something different it's nigh impossible to be fluent and up to date in all of them.
I wouldn't expect a games artist to know about classes and code architecture, nor would I expect a programmer to have an understand of mesh deformation or movement. I do think that self motivated individuals would find out what they'd need to know to be more effective in any given team dynamic, but to expect good multi-disciplined ready for pipeline everything generalists straight out of school is simply unrealistic. Yes they should be joining forces with other devs who don't art in the super low cost game jams, where learning is fast, fierce and directly applicable to the craft, I learn a lot every-time I do a game jam, if not about technical requirements, team dynamics and listening. Everyone should jam :D HINT: sit close to @Aequitas, he goes prepared!
TLDR: art generalists have a lot to do already, being proficient in programming and game design on top of that is quite a tall order. Artists who want to get into games should game jam with others.
'Animation' training in South Africa is a slightly incorrect term to use as most colleges and schools will focus on pushing out generalists. It really should be called '3d' training or '3d software' training. The main reason for this is to suit the requirements for the industry employing the most people in the field, which for a very long time has been post-production houses working on commercials. Having experienced the innards of a fair number of these post-houses, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that they are generally less organised and not nearly as concerned with things like folder structures and naming conventions as those in game dev. Obviously not all of them, but a fairly good percentage and they're generally starting to be better about proper asset tracking and the like, With the biggest hiring companies shifting to feature films over the last few years and more post-houses doing international collaboration work, pipelines have become more important to learn about while studying. Having sat on the curriculum advisory council at one of the local colleges at the end of last year (from an animation studio point of view), the importance of pipeline and structure was raised by a few of the contributors. As there were no game companies represented at this level, it's difficult for the college to be fully aware of the specific needs of this sector of the industry.
Ultimately, the technical requirements for commercials or feature film when compared to games are quite different, even if the same software is being used to get the result that's needed. I would strongly suggest engaging with the colleges (either as MGSA or individually) and really start to provide good, solid feedback on the curriculums and the areas of focus that the games industry needs from artists. Having a separate track for game-related study is a great start, but if the members of the industry doing the hiring don't get a chance to meaningfully contribute to what's being taught, it's a wasted opportunity. It's also worth bearing in mind that different companies will have slightly different workflows and even different games within the same studio will need different approaches, so trying to distill the common thread that needs to be taught can be a challenge in itself. For example, if Free Lives were to focus purely on pixel art for their games, their requirements for an artist will be different to what say RetroEpic will need if they're only doing 3d character-based games.
There are some super-talented folks like @pomb who have done features and games. The underlying requirements for both applications are pretty much the same, but the differences are so important to help distinguish between the right candidates for you to employ.
TL;DR I don't have an easy answer for this as it depends entirely on what your studio requirements are, but get involved in curriculum development at your local colleges to help groom the skills that you really need.
I seriously grates me how many people seem to go through courses (for whatever field they're keen on) and then for some reason DON'T go out and make things. There are so many reasons to take what you learn and be creative with it: To test out what you're being taught against the real world; To practice what you're learning and become natural with it; To give yourself the space and time to try different theories and prepare yourself to ask interesting questions during classes; To express yourself; And, finally, to have stuff to show people that's uniquely yours!
It's nowhere near as hard as it used to be to get into whatever part of game development you're interested in, especially as a hobby (yeah, jobs are harder, I get that), but you've never needed anyone's PERMISSION to start making things. And yet that's what I see day in and day out from every single course out there: This weird permission mindset.
So, if your angle is that you're asking me for a chance to work on game art and you haven't realised that you just CAN on your own for the love of it, I'm not very keen on hiring you.
Oh, and pure concept artists. I can't do anything with people that can only make concepts.