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18.10.2022

How to Build a Career of an Artist in Video Game Industry with Horia Dociu

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Recently we invited Horia Dociu to our SpeakEasy podcast at Devoted Studios. Horia is a publishing art director at 343 Industries working on Halo remastering. Before that, he was a studio art director for Arenanet, worked as a cinematic director, and also was a part of Sucker Punch and a bunch of other studios. We had a fantastic interview together and have some insights to share.

Horia, the question for you. Do you think that there are a lot of opportunities to build a career in the video games industry?

I believe that now is the best time to be in the game art industry. It’s a huge industry with lots of technical abilities, game software, and instantly growing popularity. We have PCs and mobile gaming, consoles, and on top of it, the Internet is different from 25 – 30 years ago. There’re so many online resources: free engines, 2D and 3D software, as well as every type of learning resource you can imagine. When years ago you had to save tens of thousands of dollars to go to college and get a degree to secure a job, now everything that matters in the gaming industry is your portfolio.

The best advice I ever received here was “Make your portfolio look like you’ve done the job you’re applying for”. And you can choose how to learn and improve your skills by yourself, either you take an online course, find yourself a mentor or use free tutorials on YouTube. Another great thing is that the gates in the industry are open for people who are working online, and companies hire people remotely, which means that you can have a full-time contract with any company, regardless of the country you live in, as soon as you are good enough.

 

You mentioned an interesting piece of advice on a portfolio. Let’s say someone wants to get hired at the Call of Duty team for weapons or hard surfaces. Does that mean that they should do a bunch of CoD fan art for their profile?

The teams working on the games such as Call of Duty operate like the whole ecosystem connected one to another. And if they need to replace someone who resolved a bunch of tasks, they will be looking for a person who has the work they need in the portfolio. You may be an amazing character artist but your portfolio would be skipped if they are looking for someone who creates guns. On the other hand, if you make your portfolio look like you managed to cope with the tasks that need to be resolved, and the results you’ve got match their requirements, the chances you get noticed are certainly higher.

So how to build a career in videogames industry nowadays?

A lot of people don’t completely realize that they are in the driver’s seat, and the choices they make on an everyday basis can lead them to their destination point or take them far away from that. Try to imagine where you want to be in 20 years from now. Of course, your initial goal may change, but it can become a North Star in your career. Let’s say I want to become a Pixar movie Director in 20 years. Now I can ask myself where a Pixar movie Director would be 10 years before that, and then where should I be in 5 years, year, month, or a week from now to reach this goal. If you can work back your goal like that, you can define what should you be working on today or this week that will help you to reach your goal in 20 years. That’s how you eat an elephant – one bite at a time because obviously, you can’t become a movie director all of a sudden, you need to take those tiny little steps.

 

Another mistake people tend to do nowadays due to the Internet and Social Media growth, is that they set up a goal to become famous. One of my friends, who is a teacher, says that all of her six-graders say they want to become famous, whether they want to make YouTube videos, Social Media blogs, or create video games. That’s a little bit mind-boggling because instead of asking yourself what you want to be good at, you make your goal vague. You never gonna get that fame without a clear understanding of what you want to bring to this world, what skills you need to master, and what sphere you’re really into.

All of these don’t mean you can’t change your destination point or career path. I’ve got a buddy who was not an artistic type and signed up for the programming degree, and then he switched over to art, and now he runs his own animation studio working for Netflix and huge companies. This is a very inspiring story about the success that comes after you figure out what you want and what are you able to do.

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17.10.2022

Tips on Character Customization

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Tramell Isaac is a VP of Art at IllFonic who worked on a Predator franchise released in 2020. We interviewed him about his job, projects, and character customization that sells.

 

Tramell, please tell us about how you started creating the game. Guide us through the first day of work. How did you decide to make Planetside 2?

This literally starts with people saying “Hey, we have an idea”. In my own experience, I have never been in a production where all of the pre-pro was done before production started. In theory, pre-production should be done to get all the things concepted; when you go into production you’re just making staff. But it never happened to me in reality. This particular project was made in 18 – 20 months from 0, so there had to be some concessions on how we went about building things. The engine itself was built while the game itself was being built. A lot of the things were made upon assumption because with this particular type of game having 5 – 6 hundred people on the server, you can’t test it internally. So we had to make a lot of assumptions about how the game would work.

What were the things you’ve learned on this project that you would never do again? Or otherwise, some things you wanted to bring to other projects?

Character customization is things that we have learned about the implant side. Without that experience, there would be no basis for it in Predators. This experience is a part of my story, I have learned how to construct things this way.

Let’s talk in detail about character customization. What are the key elements of building factions in the game? How do you design them visually so that certain people could relate themself to one or another faction?

Actually, it is a combination of psychology and visual style. The first thing that matters to most people is not a visual component, it is more about who they identify themselves with. Each one of the factions we created was neither evil nor good, each of them had its reasons for acting a certain way, and depending on the personality type people could imagine what they relate themselves to. One faction believed in science, the other one strived for freedom, and the third group trusted the government to find the answers and protect the citizens.

In the beginning, we had a really good split across the board, there were 30-34 members of each of the factions because each one of those people playing the game identified with the ideas of the group. And then we had to visually identify every group so that the players could immediately distinguish a friend from an enemy.

 

Creating the concept we decided that we basically identify every group with basic shapes – triangles, squares, and circles. We just took those shapes and expanded them to the vehicles, and armor, and that was how it all was born.

We ensure that we maintain those look sets within, and they might be completely blurred and eventually, those shapes start to round themselves out, so we start using “kind of a triangle” or “kind of a circle”. Besides, we used different color combinations for factions, and there are millions of other ways to do it.

How do you customize the characters so that you feel the difference when you pay money, that you have this armor or weapons that feel royal to you, that you either earned it or paid for it?

You start with making sure that every piece of content that you create makes a difference. I mean, you can sell badges and stuff like that, but if you have a jacket with a circle on it versus a square, it doesn’t really matter, it is still the same piece of clothing. Sometimes it needs to change a silhouette, sometimes it needs to be enough coverage. In Planetside 2 you would be able to change the armor on top of a character, and then add things on top of that: change the colors, camo patterns, etc. It was accumulations of the things you could do to make a meaningful change because in fact it’s a fashion show – I’m showing off my things to the other player, and if it’s cool enough, they want to get it. But it’s also important to make these items rare, some of them can be received only at special events, which will make them even more desirable.

And for me, as for artists, it is important to understand that even though I personally would not want some items myself, other people might desire them. For example, I would not buy a pink gunskin, but some other people definitely would do that.

How do you know that? Are there any methods to estimate if certain items will look attractive to others?

You should listen to what people say, this is one of the reasons why we did it inside the player studio. We made an effort to outreach to the community and find out what they want. And nine times out of ten they would come up with “I would like this”, “I want to see this in a game”, and then we would put it out and that would sell. So my point is as long as you pay attention to your clientele and to people that are actually playing the game, you’ll easily figure out what they want.

Watch the full Devoted Speak Easy episode on Youtube!