While I am currently almost simultaneously working on several blog posts, I am quickly taking a break to post about a topic which we recently talked about as part of our critical studies module. We looked at different job specifications and came up with a lists of general skills that one might need to be able to work in the games industry as an artist. This was ranging from your usual skills such as knowing how to use the software and having an understanding of art, to social skills and time management.
As a bit of homework we were asked to research an entry level or graduate/junior job offer and then compare it to what skills we already have and create a roadmap of skills we would need to work on to be able to meet the criteria.
Finding a Job
I sat down and was trying to find a job offer and while I knew it wasn't going to be easy, I never expected it to be that hard. I think it's safe to say that I have learned that there aren't many jobs out there for graduates; pretty much none at all at the moment it seems. I did however manage to find one in the end and although the job specifications are very vague, I thought it would be better than nothing.
The job offer that I have chosen can be found here:
(working as of 7th March 2014)
Do you have what it takes?
Let's have a look at what is being asked of the perfect candidate:
"Self-motivation, good communications skills, and a great team-player attitude"
I am not sure if the order of these requirements matter, but if I assume that the first one would be the most important one then I am off to a good start here. My self-motivation isn't always at its peak and I have my times where I am feeling quite down and I am not being all too productive, however I believe that university is giving me a great chance to work on this and I can already see improvement from when I started the course. In the end without self-motivation I would never be able to get a degree, so I guess that it would be kinda self-explanatory that a graduate would have self-motivation.
"Good communications skills and a great team-player attitude" are both skills that I was able to take away from when I used to work at McDonald's. While it wasn't the greatest job, it did teach me a lot about working as part of a team and the importance of communication. They taught me about the 3 Cs: Communication, Co-operation and Co-ordination. All of those were vital to run the store efficiently.
"Creative person with a passion for games"
Okay, the next point is something which is quite open. It would be hard calling yourself an artist without being creative at all, so maybe this is just nailing it down. It all comes down to the definition of creative I guess and because I wasn't quite sure what the actual definition was, I decided to have a look:
- 1.relating to or involving the use of the imagination or original ideas to create something.
So I guess this makes it quite clear, they want a person that is able to come up with ideas and is able to put those ideas onto paper. While I do struggle with this at times, I also got quite a lot of practice in this area recently, as part of my visual design projects were coming up with a vehicle and a character. So hopefully by the time I finish this course I will have had enough practice at it to consider myself a creative person.
As for having a passion for games: I was just going to say that I study Game Art Design and I believe that this would kinda make the rest self-explanatory, but maybe I should go a bit further into it. I have played games ever since I was a young child. We owned a Nintendo 64 and my dad would always bring home games for us to play. I absolutely loved it. As the years went by I eventually got my own PC and mainly used it to play some early PC games. I remember, the first game I played on my own PC was called "Holiday Island". Every few years I would get a newer and better PC to run the new games and still today I am an avid PC gamer myself with a collection of over 400 games and while I don't always have the time to play them I enjoy every minute that I can spare on gaming.
"Strong art skills in both 2D and 3D"
This point is always something that I struggle with. I am an art student, so obviously I am at university to learn and practice my skills. While I am quite confident with my 3D skills (except for my issue with textures) my main reason for being concerned about this point is my 2D skills.
I had never really spent a lot of time in my childhood drawing and even though I studied art and design at school, I wasn't particularly good at it. However, I did enjoy it and I think that is what mattered most in the end. If it weren't for me enjoying drawing so much (and even creating stuff in general) then I wouldn't have the necessary patience to spend time on it now to get better at it. I have already made massive improvements since I started my course and I believe that by the end of the next 2 years I will be able to say to myself that I have "strong art skills".
When it comes to 3D, like I said, I feel quite confident. However I do believe that one can never be perfect at something. There is always room for improvement and when I say that I feel quite confident about it, then by no means do I mean that I would be ready to use my skills in a professional job. It simply means, that I am quite happy with the stuff I can do, which currently (even after all the improvement) is not something I can say about my 2D work. Nonetheless, I am pretty certain that the course will give me a very good chance to practice both of those areas.
"Good portfolio demonstrating aesthetic sense and artistic eye"
There isn't really much to say about this one. It's simply them asking to prove that we can actually do what we say we can. During our last visual design lecture we had been told that by the end of the course we would create a book to demonstrate our learning process at university and show what we can do and in general we will create a lot of work at university which we could use as part of our portfolio. Judging by the variety of projects that we did in the first year alone I can safely say, that my portfolio would easily be able to demonstrate the things that are being asked for.
"Willingness to learn"
Again, this is something that I believe comes quite self-explanatory. If I wouldn't be willing to learn, I surely wouldn't be studying at university right now. As I have mentioned before, one can never be perfect at anything and I am happy if I can learn new stuff. To a certain extent my job at McDonald's has kinda required that as well. There was a lot of different jobs that needed to be done to run the store and while most of them were quite easy, you first had to learn how to do them. You had to learn the right procedures and how to use the specialized equipment. If I wouldn't be willing to learn, I wouldn't have ended up being trained to do nearly every single job in the whole restaurant.
"Excellent knowledge of 3DS Max and Photoshop"
Having over 2 years of experience with those programmes certainly helps here. I was lucky enough to use both programmes during my time at college and I continue to constantly learn new tricks on using them while I am at uni. Again I have to go back to saying that one can never perfect at anything, as the same goes for using software. Every time I find myself working together with other people I am always happy when someone shows me a different way of doing things within the software and although I already have quite an extensive knowledge for both programmes, I believe that by the end of the course I would have learned so much more which will help me hitting this criteria with ease.
Rounding Off
So there we go, while I do not meet every criteria exactly yet, I am pretty confident that I am definitely on the right track. I strongly believe that my university course is giving me what I need to become a great artist; and that is really what I need the most right now. Further developing my skills in 3D and especially in 2D is my main objective and I need to push myself to achieve what I truly can achieve; and with that said I will make an end here, as there is more blog posts waiting for me. I will aim to publish the next one within this week, but if I get caught up again it will definitely come up next week.
