[nova]

I'm studying the Development process of an RPG (and designing a sketch of my own) for my HS senior project and have a few questions to ask those who know. These may sound kind of 'no duh', but it's the details i'm looking for. See, we have to get info from each of our sources specifically about the project. This forum jost so happens to be a source of mine. If any or all questions can be answered, please do

So:

1. What exactly does a concept artist do in 'a day in the life'? Do they come up with characters themselves, work with a team.. etc?

2. What is the basic process of designing a game?

3. What are a few art jobs in a game company?

4. How much of a job do writers have, considering if they work with a group, alone?

5. What's the average number of people working at a game company?


Whoa, yeah.. these are pretty broad, but try to make sense of what I'm asking here. Thanks!




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*nova
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[faustgfx]

i'll answer #3 'cause it does not require thinking

what we have

-generic 2d guys
-generic 3d guys
-generic print guys
-generic www guys
-generic animation guys
-generic maxscript guys
-generic other inhouse tool guys
-generic video guys

then there's me who does all of it |:

off for a lunch. hurry. i am.


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sky high with a heartache of stone you never see me 'cos i'm always alone/ministry
the law of lead now reigns!@#!/earth crisis

[email protected]
icq#35983387
http://faustgfx.0wns.org

[Flinthawk]

Ok, I'll give it a shot. Just be warned, you are indeed being fairly broad because, from what I've heard and experienced thus far, each company is different.

1. Ok, at our company we don't really have a designated concept artist. We contracted someone to do sketches for the main characters after we'd written up descriptions of each one and how they fit into the story. Our art director does some concepts for environments and objects and then people like me are given the opportunity to do concepts for non-important characters, items as well as some other environment work. Other companies can have a designated concept artist(s) who sits there and comes up with numerous sketches based on their own ideas or those of the designers and that would be pretty much what they do every day. There are other companies, like the one a friend is at, where he is a concept artist but he also builds/textures/animates character models.

2. Again, each company is different. For here, we get the concept and write up a design treatment that covers the basics of what the game will be and why it'll be fun. This's what is sold to the publishers in the hopes they'll like a proposal and pay us to make the game for them. Sometimes a publisher will come to us and ask us to build a game they already came up with which is essentially what we're doing now. We got straight to work on a demo to prove that we can pull off the game by demonstrating certain basics of art and programming involved in the specific game. During this time our designers worked at fleshing out a game design document, complete with story, game elements, character descriptions, technical specs, target audiences, level descriptions, item descriptions, etc., etc. They're still working on the design while we're working away on the first playable demo for the publisher since they liked what they saw and signed a contract with us to complete the game. Other companies, bigger companies, may have game designs already written up just waiting to be made and since a lot of big companies publish their own games they only have to answer to themselves so providing they have a team available, they get to work on it.

3. A few jobs in most game companies include Art Director, Art Lead, Tech Artist, Animator, 2D Artist, 3D Artist, Technical Director, AI programmer, Graphics programmer, Lead Programmer, Sound Engineer, Producer, Product Manager, Director, Game Designer, Level Designer and others that I can't think of. Depending on the company these jobs can get combined with each other. Take myself as an example...I'm a 2D/3D Artist and occasional Animator, my official title being Production Artist because I pretty much do a little of everything. This's because we're a fairly small company so everybody here has to be able to cover for anybody else. Bigger companies can afford specialists who'd concentrate on one aspect of the process so you might have places where people are dedicated to doing textures while another to modeling and another to animation. Hmmm, just realized you wanted 'art' jobs, heh. Guess you got more than you asked for

4. Well, for our game, we contracted out a professional novel writer to help with our story. Some games aren't very story driven so the writing may be left to the designers themselves. We've got the small luxury of having a designer or two that actually write as well as the contract. Other companies get by without having writers because of the type of games they produce (you try writing a story for a NASCAR racing game or something, hehe).

5. Well, I'm at a fairly small company. Right now we're about 25 people and growing pretty fast since we'll need a second team for an upcoming project. I hear the number 50 come up a lot when talking about developers but the big boys can number in the thousands I believe. Like Square, I mean, they had over 100 people working on just Final Fantasy VIII and they have many other projects going on so you know they've got quite the work force.

Phew, my hands hurt now. I'm sure there're other people on the board that can clear things up on other angles. Hope that helped any.

-Flinthawk


[edit]just some grammer crap...

[This message has been edited by Flinthawk (edited January 31, 2001).]

[This message has been edited by Flinthawk (edited January 31, 2001).]

[Francis]

Flinthawk did a great job explaining the gig at his company. Like he said, there actually aren't a lot of places that have people doing strictly concept art. Presto (where I work, as do a lot of other forum members) is one of those places, so I thought I'd pass along some info. By the way, my wife's nephew is doing pretty much the same assignment for his high school class. He's actually planning to come out during the summer sometime to visit Presto.


1. What exactly does a concept artist do in 'a day in the life'? Do they come up with characters themselves, work with a team.. etc?

2. What is the basic process of designing a game?

My title is conceptual designer. The job changes depending on what part of the development process we are in. In the beginning, we were just a small preproduction/design team which included a writer, producer, creative director and a couple of conceptual designers. During this period, we brainstormed ideas for story, environments, characters and game play. This part was mainly meetings and discussion. As the concept artists, our job at this point was to come up with as many "blue sky" ideas as possible, which we'd then bring back to the meetings to help generate more discussion.

Once we had a story more or less established, we got more specific in terms of environments and characters. At that point, we needed to make our concept stuff tighter, taking into account all the requirements for gameplay, story etc. We worked mainly with the creative director, who made sure that our designs remained true to an overall concept or vision, but allowed us a lot of freedom in terms of designing the environments and characters. Once the design work was more or less complete, the production teams were brought in to create the 3D geometry, textures and animation. At this stage, the job of the conceptual designer is to work with the production teams, answering questions about the design, coming up with solutions for unforseen problems (which happens quite a lot), designing new elements which may not have been anticipated in the original design, etc.

Towards the end of the production (where we are now), the concept guys are helping to fill in holes in the production cycle. For example, Ron (Fred Flick Stone) is painting in a lot of details that are difficult or impossible to get with 3D, and I'm doing a lot of compositing and 2D effects for the animations. At the same time, a few other people are taking the completed graphics and programming the gameplay, which basically entails linking the graphics and animations together based on input from the player.


3. What are a few art jobs in a game company?

At Presto, the art positions are creative director, conceptual designer, 3D modeller, 2D texture artist, and animator. Those terms are pretty general, and there is a lot of overlap from one job to another. For instance, one animator on my team started out as a texture artist and assumed the role of animator once his texture work was done. The other animator actually did a lot of the models and textures in the environment he worked on.


4. How much of a job do writers have, considering if they work with a group, alone?

We have two full time writers on staff, and their jobs include a lot of duties besides writing. In addition to writing the story and documenting the design process (in a design document, which is what the publisher uses to follow the progress of the game design before there is actually much in the way of graphics or game), our writer for Myst 3 also prepared a lot of interviews and articles for various web and magazine press (with the help of our PR person). Our other writer is currently helping program the game and tracking all the graphics assets. A lot of the writing is done alone, but after meeting with the design team and hashing out the basics, just like the conceptual designers.


5. What's the average number of people working at a game company?

This seems to vary really widely. At Presto we have about 35.

Also, I recently started up a small concept art/design forum at my site. Right now it's pretty empty, but if you post your question there as well, I'll see if I can round up some more input.

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Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[Rinaldo]

"Also, I recently started up a small concept art/design forum at my site. Right now it's pretty empty, but if you post your question there as well, I'll see if I can round up some more input."

*cough* err...where abouts exactly Francis? I can't seem to find it.

could have something to do with how late it is right now and also my natural inability to function mentaly to any great degree

[Francis]

Oops. Here:

http://pub51.ezboard.com/bconceptualdesign

Also, there is a link to it on the first page of my site.



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Francis Tsai
TeamGT Studios

[Ian_Milham]

Hi Nova.

Flinthawk has done a good job above answering your questions, so I'll try not to duplicate what he said.

Here at LucasArts, and average art team would break down like this:

Lead Artist: Art Director for the whole game. The quality and consistency of all the game's artwork are his or her responsibility.

Concept Artist: Works with the Lead Artist and Director to conceptualize all the things for the game. Every project here has one, some have two. The ideas usually come from the Designers and Director. The looks come from the Lead and Concept Artists.

Then we have individual discipline artists such as Animators, Character Modelers, Special Effects artists, and enviornment modelers.

We also have technical artists, whose job it is to take the art assets from other artists and get them ready for the game engine. These are usual Character Technical Directors, who do the skeleton, vertex weighting, etc., and Art Techs, who do the world things like bounding boxes, surface properties, etc.

Since we're a relatively large developer with several projects concurrently in development, we have the luxury of staffing up or down as the project needs dictate. A project may go from 1 animator to 15 and back during it's lifetime. Usually the Lead Artist and one lead from each discipline will stay with the production over it's entire lifespan.

[Rinaldo]

ahhh...refresh Rin refresh

needed the old ctrl+f5 to kick it into updating.

cool

[nova]

Thanks everybody! Your input will be part of this lowly high schooler's project.. and will be well used. I really appreciate it

*heading over to Francis' fourm..*



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*nova
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