Week 7 - An introduction to Art Direction for Games

"Art Direction -

In professional game art departments, the art director is the captain of the ship. Art directors are generally responsible for setting the visual tone, quality, and style for the game. They are at least indirectly responsible for every object, texture, level, character, and effect that appears in a game. This is a profound responsibility.

A good art director must consider how each character, prop, set, and location will look from any possible place in any level of the game. Even things like plants, trees, paving stones, cracks in the walls, and graffiti must be carefully designed to support the story, feel, and illusion of the game. Sometimes, the individual props and furnishings can be as crucial to the story as many of the characters the player encounters."

Wow, short and sweet, but conveys a lot about the duties a Game Art Director has to his team, and to the game. An Art Director is responcible for the style and atmosphere in the game, for if he does his job right, the backgrounds and items within the game can support itself, providing the feeling and atmosphere that you want to fit in with the genre of the game, for example making sure the graphics are right to provide a creepy, slightly gross background within a horror game. He or she makes sure that the artists keep everything to the Art Style Guide and that everything is as it should be for positions and colours and effects and it sounds like a huge job...

I'd say that drirection in that respect is very similar to film directing, where a bad director will not make a good film, not matter how many highly paid actors he has, like them, an Art Director has to be prepared for anything and able to keep things running and looking smooth and prefect... poor guy...

And yet saying that, I either want to get a job in a games company, or start a Game Art Company all of my own, of course not on my own, I have my eyes out for people to recruit if/when I do start my own company. The question would be, would I be an Art Director, and if so what skills would I have to develop?

The obvious ones would be drawing and modelling...

No, not the Miss England type modeling...

Skills like 3D modelling in engines like 3DMax, and perfecting my skills in Photoshop.

Also I would need good people skills, something I never used to possess, (Thank you Robin), and be able to handle eveything at once, managing people and time and money and companies that want our work... Now I'm getting ahead of myself... it's got to be better then getting behind...

Anyway, I'm getting distracted, the thing will be to listen to the guest speaker, later on today, since it's now 1 am, and work out where to go from there, maybe he can give me a few clues.

See ya later,

Joey