Job Research - Critical Studies

Introduction

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:

http://www.indeed.co.uk/cmp/Cherry-Pop-Games/jobs/Junior-63dd79be5eab2e14

(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. 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.

A Quick Update!

I am still alive!

Hi there! It has been a while since I have updated this blog and I thought I would just send out a quick post to let people know that I am still breathing. I have been quite busy over the past few weeks and will probably do a proper update soon. I also have a post planned which is long due which I will aim to publish by the end of next week giving some insight into the history of "cheat codes" and "easter eggs" within video games.

Stay tuned.

Recap: From Rainstorms And Other Obstacles

Time to catch up!

Time management is not always easy; And neither is writing this blog regularly. So besides having to work on my personal skill development I will also need to focus and come up with a schedule for myself to better balance my busy life. In the future I will try to aim to write these posts more regular, but for now I will continue with my recap-series to bring this blog up to date with my experiences at uni so far.

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Drawing in the Rain.

So here we are, once again; Living in the United Kingdom does have its benefits at times but it also comes with one major problem for an artist: Rain.

While we are expected to do all our drawings from life, I do not have a problem with that at all, until the weather decides to put up a massive obstacle. Rain does not only make it a lot more uncomfortable to draw, it also likes to soak your sketchbook, ultimately ruining all of your work.

So what to do in hard times like these? Well first of all it's all about being flexible. Sure, it does rain quite often during this time of the year, however there will always be periods of dryness in-between the showers. This is the time that artists like myself should go out and draw! As weather predictions are not always 100% accurate, this means that you sometimes spontaneously need to go outside. This is not something a person can plan.

Another quite important part is equipment. I have invested in a camping chair which makes it a lot more comfortable to draw on the site. I also decided to get myself an umbrella for those rainy days. Now just to solve the problem of holding an umbrella while drawing with the other hand.

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Work Progress.

But enough of me ranting about all the stuff that's making this course harder than it already is. Here is some of my progress that I have made over the past few weeks:

Life Drawing

While life drawing seems to be my weakest subject I do have to say that I kinda enjoy getting to use a variety of different mediums. I particularly like using charcoal, even though it seems to be a bit of a hassle and quite messy.

I can see slight improvement in my work, but it will still take quite a while for me to get proportion good enough to be even slightly happy with my drawings. Until then I must increase my practice. I ordered a mannequin to get the hang of drawing proportion from life, but I guess I will ultimately go and get some people that I can draw; even if it means I end up having to draw myself.

Week 2

Week 3

Week 5

Visual Design

On the other hand, the rest of my visual design stuff seems to be going great. I can see improvement simply by looking through the pages and I really enjoy getting out to draw different things (as long as it's not raining of course..)

Week 2

Week 3

Week 3

Week 4

Game Production

Probably the easiest part for me. Since I came to this course with 2 years of experience in using 3DS Max, I do not particularly find it difficult fulfilling the set tasks, however it seems like I have recently not been putting in enough time into my models and I found myself rushing through them way too fast and not putting in the effort that I could put in.

Nonetheless I do still think that they are not too bad, just not good enough for what I could make out of them. In the future I will try and spend more time on creating my models and especially my textures, which I seem to have most troubles with.

Phonebox Project

Architecture Project

Recap: Tough Beginnings / Welcome to Boot Camp

Week 1

Visual Design.

Having not done art for quite a while certainly did show its effect during the first week. Literally being thrown into cold water and starting right off with some life drawing, followed by heading down to the river to explore single-point perspective. "Welcome to Boot Camp", as my lecturer kindly pointed out.

Life Drawing.

The first day was quite tiresome but still I decided that this is not going to be the end and I decided to fight. I was given a chance and I am sure not to throw it all away. So after a bit of difficulties in the beginning I went out and completed the set task. In fact I also noticed quite a bit of improvement from day to day (most likely just getting the hang of drawing stuff again).

Thumbnail Sketches.

In the end I managed to produce a quite pleasing piece of work. Sure, it's not grade 'A' quality work just yet, but hopefully I will get there eventually.

Final Piece.

Game Production.

As I mentioned within my introduction I already had experience with 3D modelling and using 3DS Max. Therefore having another "getting started" session with 3DS Max was probably the easiest task during my first week. After getting introduced to all the basic tools and navigating within the program we were set of creating a Dalek from Doctor Who, staying within the 1500 tri limit.

Sounds easy enough. As this was just an exercise to get used to Max we didn't have to texture it, but just to make it look a bit more convincing I decided to just slap on some materials.

Dalek Render.

I was quite pleased with my result although I probably could've polished it up a bit here and there by removing some unneeded polys.

Wireframe.

So this is it.. This was my first week here at DeMontfort University. So far I am impressed with how the course is laid out and I am looking forwards to my future weeks and all the work I will be doing. I will try and update this blog a bit more regularly (once I finished catching up).

Thank for reading and if you (the reader) have got any suggestions then please always feel free to post them. Whether it is related to my work or my blog, I am always happy to receive some feedback.

See you in the next post!~

An Introduction To Myself

So here we are... We are at the beginning of a journey, the beginning of a new life, the beginning of possibly the most important time I will ever spend during my life. My name is Dominic Mathuse and I am a Game Art Design student at DeMontfort University.

History.
(Or "How It Began..")

To start off, I would like to give a bit of information about my history. I was born in Germany and spent most of my life there. While I always seemed attracted to video games and quickly grew up to be interested in not just playing them but also creating them, I have never been the person to consider myself an artist; in fact I still not completely do so.

I was born with a strong logical mind and therefore never spent too much time being creative, even though I always enjoyed it the most. My first bit of creative interest started developing when I began to play piano at the age of 10. I only had lessons for a year but since then always spent time playing piano whenever I felt like it and quickly I discovered that I was also interested in coming up with my own songs, even if I was missing the required knowledge to achieve this.

So over the years it became more and more clear to me that even though I was born with a strong logical mind and it would probably be the easiest for me to end up becoming a mathematician or physicist, I was actually way more interested in the process of creation. Being able to put all the mess that is going through my head into a form of creative piece was what I enjoyed doing all throughout my life and I decided that this is definitely something I would love to do for the rest of it, too. However, my journey of becoming a games artist doesn't start there...

Choices?
(From School To College)

After moving to the UK I was, for the first time in my life, being presented with a choice of optional courses I could do at school. One of the courses I chose to do was art and design and while I still wasn't particularly good at it, I definitely still enjoyed it as much as I always did and so I went through and actually managed to pass my GCSE. Still not being quite sure as what I wanted to become I then applied to college to study maths as well as computing as those were the only subjects I felt most comfortable in studying. However due to complications in my family I ended up moving away and not being able to attend the college I applied to.

A few gap years later, still not having done my college education, I eventually decided that in order to succeed in life I would need to specialize myself in a particular area. Having taught myself very basic programming skills and due to my love for games I quickly decided that the games industry would be the way to go. I didn't enjoy programming too much though and I didn't think of myself as being good enough to be an artist so I wasn't quite sure what I actually wanted to do. I went researching and eventually found a college course which seemed not too specialized, offering me an insight into different jobs within the games industry (or at least so I thought.)

Having successfully applied for the course I then went back into studying and finally had the chance to start setting goals for my future. However, I quickly realized that the course was a lot more art based than I first had imagined and I became a bit anxious as to whether I was good enough or not, but this lifted within the first few weeks when I noticed that many people on the course were equally skilled in art and because I always enjoyed being creative I took this as an opportunity to maybe learn a bit more about art.

Going through the years I had learnt a lot about the games industry and the different roles within that I could become part of. While I wasn't very good at drawing I first got taught how to create 3D models and immediately discovered that I had a lot less problems with that than I had with drawing. So being a "natural talent" in 3D I quickly worked my way to be the best 3D artist of the class, which then resulted in me being entered into the 2011 first ever World Skills Speed Modelling competition, which was hosted at my college, and winning the gold medal. (A bit more about this little competition can be found here and here). This had not only given me more confidence, but it also finally set my goal clear: I wanted to become a 3D artist (or did I?)

Uncertainty!
("Realizing Your Ambition")

Progressing through to my second year at college I then discovered that 3D might not be as simple as it looks. While I could create models easily, I struggled with getting textures right. On several projects we were allowed to use photographic textures, but on others we either weren't or there just wasn't any available so I needed to paint my own. Since I wasn't very good at drawing this caused problems and again my goal became a bit unclear. If I would want to be a 3D artist I would need to improve my drawing skills!

So the end of the second year came closer and closer and it was time to apply to university and again there was many different choices. While quite a few courses seemed more 3D or programming based there were a few art based courses as well. One of the ones that stood out the most was the Game Art Design course at DMU. Knowing that it would straight on require me to be able to draw though I wasn't sure whether I was good enough to even bother applying, but I decided to do it anyway (got nothing to lose, right?).

Surprisingly enough I then received an invitation to an interview (the other universities gave me an offer straight away). This was the time that I had to show them that I was ready for the course. I knew that they expected high standard work, mostly for drawings. Looking through what I had created during my time at college, I quickly realized that my portfolio was not only lacking on quality but also on quantity. So I decided to spent as much free time as I had during the upcoming weeks to my interview trying to improve my portfolio to as high of a standard as I could.

The interview day came by and I went through it quicker than I had hoped. Not only was it shorter than my friends interviews but I also still felt like I wasn't good enough to get an offer, but not giving up hope I went back home and eagerly awaited the results of my interview. The first batch of offers were sent out and while a friend of mine already got offered a course, my application was held for further consideration. A few more long and sleepless weeks I then finally received the e-mail that made my heart jump high into the sky. I managed to get a conditional offer!

Now it was time to get through my college course and achieve the grade I needed to actually get onto the course. So even if I was struggling with time management towards the end of the year I managed to get everything done and left college with quite pleasing results. I then got offered an unconditional offer and immediately decided that DMU was going to be my firm choice.

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So here we are... While I still don't consider myself an artist I am pleased that I have been offered this opportunity to study this course and I am confident that it will give me the skills that I am missing to finally be able to call myself and artist. This blog will follow me throughout my journey of development and the 3 exciting years that I have in front of me.

Thanks for reading.