Conscientious Content Creators

One of the earliest things I learned about game development is that most game artists are half-technician/half-artist. I think this is something people outside the industry, or new to the industry, might not understand. Creating wicked art content, especially for consoles, takes as much attention to memory as visuals. In a way, it reminds me of stories I hear about old game programmers optimizing every bit of code just to fit the executable on cartridge memory. Basically, we want the game to look great, but in order for it to run on a console with a poorly fragmented memory system (read: PS3), meshes need to get smaller, shaders need to be simpler, and textures need to be lower res. While there certainly remains a place for the pure artist to provide artistic direction, an artist understands how to make simpler smaller pieces look great is a true asset.

Oh yeah, by the way, not only do we want it smaller and sleeker, but a game artist needs to produce it faster too. Watching game artists get setup to work is amazing in it's own right. It's almost like watching a musician setup their instrument. They setup their tools with keybindings, scripts, macros, etc to make their workflow as efficient as possible. Not only do they need to have a skilled eye for color and form, but also the innate ability to identify redundant or repetitive tasks and find creative ways to automate them.

Of course, AAA titles require a significant amount of content. The sheer quantity of the content requires it to be labeled, organized and stored in such a way that a team of artists, designers, programmers and possibly external contractors can easily access it. I haven't been to art school, but I'm guessing it's tough to prepare people to work in such an environment, let alone establish this structure for a new project. Like everything else in this article, these intrinsic skills, so valuable to a game artist, are gained primarily from experience. Experience that can be gained from amateur or professional projects. Either way, game artists have far greater toolsets that simply creating great looking content.