First batch
What was the most stressful project you worked on?
Definitely, 100%
Steambirds Alliance for Spryfox. Theyre awesome and its a game that I think ios very, very good (MMO, Bullet Hell, Roguelike, F2P) I was brought in for a 6 month contract and tasked to revamp the entire look of the game to make it more marketable in order for them to find a publisher. I was the AD but only had an art intern to work with and a partime VFX artist. Coming up with an artstyle we could deliver on with a super small timeframe while working from home and managing other freelance work at the time was super, super stressful. We managed to come up with a really cool solution (seen below) which made it very scalable because we had a textureless art style, making Unity do most of the work with lighting, vertex shading, realtime Ambient Occulusion and liberal use of colored fog but I definitely put my share of blood, sweat and tears on this one. Below is an example of how the game looked when I joined and how it looked when I handed it off before my departure.
What does the average day of an artist in the video game industry look like?
Depends on your team size (indie, mobile or AAA) and responsibility. If youre on smaller teams youre asked to be more of a semi specialist that can also be a jack of all trades vs working in AAA you can be one of 6 character artists that specializes in modeling faces, maybe ... but if youre in an indie project you probably have to do 40% of the art needs a game has, depending on your role.
Each company is also very different culturally. When I was at Kiwi or SGN, sometimes I worked on several games at once and most of them are in different development stages so it could literally be that game A needs a visual target in order to get greenlit so thats gonna take 2 days at least but game B needs a new asset update so I gotta make some new ground tiles to go with the 4th of July theme whereas game C has some assets dropped from outsourcing so I need to make some time before lunch to check them out and provide feedback because theyre in BUENOS AIRES and theyre in a different schedule.
For EA it was different, there I was the Lead Artist and was basically in charge of the entire art team so I could go and tell our VFX guy "hey, I want to show this to Lucas today so please have the VFX for "x" ready by noon, then start working on "y" right after. Meanwhile our environment artist would be waiting on an asset drop from our outsourcer before getting started on the next env but in the meantime he was fine tuning the env thats closest to release or doing some minor tasks while waiting so he would have time to attend strategy meetings about the next content drop.
So as you can see its hard to nail the "average" I have found that mostly a production artist has a few standup meetings in the mornings every week, a couple of art reviews and the rest is heavily based on production time. It's not quite a 9-5 job because overtime is a thing but 9:30 to 6:30 is something Ive seen a lot
What is crunch like for artists? I think we can all imagine the programming side of things, but is it just a quantitatively harder workload for artists?
How well do companies help artists alleviate RSI and avoid it altogether?
Crunch for artists fucking sucks! We dont always have to do it but some artists in some companies, especially the ones you would recognize, are in a constant state of crunch and I feel for them. Its not so much being able to make things that takes forever, its being able to TEST THEM, IN GAME that adds significant time and effort. Lets say youre an env artist, you have to be able to bake a lightmap in order to check your work, that can take HOURS depending on your setup, rendering your computer UNUSABLE for the duration ... so maybe you actually have TWO computers so you can work on other stuff while that lightmap bakes. Once you do that, you still need to test your work in-game, Ive been in places where it would take 40 minutes to an hour plus in order to compile all the shit in order to check things in a build. The problem with AAA dev and even in mobile, is that TOOLS often are not nearly at the same tech level that the expected asset quality, meaning youre asking PS2 level tools to handle PS4 level models and textures, meaning everything takes 5x longer to load and test.
Thats a big reason why more devs stopped using custom engines and started using 3rd party solutions that already had better tech built in.
Anyways, so yeah, its difficult because often the tools are not as good as they need to be in order to get the "easy" shit done quickly. It can also be very difficult because of the amount of quality other departments expect at all times, meaning a Producer wont be able to understand a concept if its not final art, leading to a TON of wasted work because suits cannot understand WIP's unless theyre colored or whatnot. Especially with art you see a lot of wasted work because art is seen as pretty disposable and misunderstood. Lots of "cant you just maker it like this?" comments, the artist knows that it would be a shit ton of work but will often just comply. Ive been in a ton of companies where the art dept doesnt have a seat at the big boys table and thus are often unable to argue for or against the amount of work given to the art team ... instead you see a lot of non-artists make assumptions about the art team can and cant do. It's a process I personally work very hard at to fix in every company I join.
This is an imperfect answer btw, theres tons more to unpack and it varies wildly from company to company. I personally barely ever crunch and have been in companies that never do, some that do all the time and some where only some people do because theyre the last group that needs to do something before release (Audio and VFX, for instance)
I assume you mean Repetitive Stress Injuries? Companies like EA are very supportive of employee health and often encourage people to get off their desks and be active. I personally make sure to organize lunchtime soccer or basketball outings 2/3 times a week so people can get off their desks and do something. Nowadays mosts desks are mechanical so you can turn it into a standing desk at anytime. Im sure other companies dont go to such lengths, however. It was a lot more difficult to have good health habits when I freelanced though, once youre on your own doing your own thing you "want" to work harder and often stay in the same pose for HOURS. Being in a studio, going to meetings, working with other teams, etc, often helps alleviate RSI because youre not locked in the same position for hours on end.
Favourite IP you've worked on?
Star Wars! Being able to contribute significantly to that IP like revamping KOTOR concepts, getting storyboards approved by Lucas or the many other cool shit we get to do has been the chance of a lifetime.
Outside of that, Skullgirls. Ive always been hoping to work on a fighting game and they gave me that opportunity, as part of the animation team, no less! Small role, huge thrill.
Having more powerful hardware at your team/company´s disposal have any impact on your work as an artist?
Absolutely, often the Photoshop files we work in oscillate 800 MB or even some GB every now and then. Its a huge bonus to be in a studio that can splurge on top tier hardware like a big Cintiq as well.
However, for some big companies, theres also a lot of limitations like the heavy antivirus you need to have at all times so your super awesome computer will have a lot of IT mandated stuff on it, making it slower than it needs to be
Anyway, how's your sex life?
Dude, during this quarantine? AWESOME