The Gaming Industry: How did you get in?
polycounter lvl 6
This thread is mainly towards people who are currently in the gaming industry. I want to hear your stories, your hardships, your sacrifices, your last second decisions, what you learned in school, what inspires you etc...
If your not in the gaming industry feel free to give advice anyway... I made this thread to get different perspectives of how people got in and how they got there to inspire me and see what may work for me and what may not.
If your not in the gaming industry feel free to give advice anyway... I made this thread to get different perspectives of how people got in and how they got there to inspire me and see what may work for me and what may not.
Replies
After a few months of that, they offered to make it a full time position.
Bada-bing.
Moving from there to Epic Games was almost as seamless. Between projects I made an Unreal Tournament level (Ride the Dragon). Cliff saw it, contacted me, asked if I was interested in coming to Epic, and bam ... there you go!
Obviously, I was very VERY lucky to be in the right places and be seen by the right people at the right moments.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Game_Industry#How_to_Get_In
Not to discourage people from posting their stories in here of course, you should feel free to post whatever you like.
I got in by pestering, and right place/right time.
A few months after finishing my internship, the company started offering me freelance work, which I did. I got a few thousand dollars of freelance out of it, until one day they took me on for a three month full time contract. That was nine months ago, and I'm still here.
I wanted to do 3d art ever since we'd used CAD at school, and I was fascinated by games. So after school finished I managed to get accepted on to a decent Computer Games Modelling and Animation course at Derby Uni. When I was there the course was led by a pro who used to be an Art Manager at Sony Evo.
Worked my arse off for three years and towards the end of it my tutor had passed on my stuff to the now defunct Eurocom, who was just down the road. They interviewed myself and a close friend (who I was also living with at the time), and the very next day (which was also the last day of uni) we were both offered jobs as Jnr Env Artists on the same team.
I was severely pissed off about the way that studio shut down 18 months later, but they gave me a huge opportunity straight out of the gate, and I managed to get offered a better job in a better city two weeks after, so it's all worked out well so far.
Internships are awesome.
I succesfully passed the preparation year but miserably failled the first year in video game art. That wasn't quite surprising as I had never done any 3D. So I started working my ass off to get to the level I wanted and finally passed the first year.
The second year we had to find a 3 month intership. One of my teachers that was the lead character artist at AMA studio on Fighter Within offered me an intership as a character artist. I loved working there but by the time I graduated the studio closed.
So after graduating in 2013, I took some shit jobs while working on my porfolio because the only good stuff I could show was from Fighter Within and I wasn't allowed to show much. 5 month later I felt like I had enough material to apply for a studio job. I didn't get many answers for 3 months then Asobo studio asked me to pass an art test for a character artist position. I got an interview in March and in May they offered me the job. I finally entered the video game industry the 2nd of June 2014 and it has been a blast so far!
So it took me 5 years of hard work to get from zero 3D knowledge to professionnal character artist.
I think I was incredibly lucky to get to work on ED without any real experience or qualifications.
But that failed, so instead:
weirdest thing i thought was that i always struggled getting a job, and when i got one people always seemed surpised that i was not a complete failure.
as a person severly lacking selfmotivation it was kinda tough getting better at stuff, but over time i gues i somehow managed to become decent enough.
also i went to a for profit school and one of the dudes i studied with connected me to my first gig, wich was probably very important for my motivation and drive, even though i didn't learn that much.
i dropped out of highschool at 17 too and i think that was one of the best decisions of my life.
I started messing around with 3d art in late 2009 and I just learned through trial and error and some tutorials online. I eventually got involved with the modding and indie community which taught me some valuable things along the way even if the games did not succeed, I also met some great people.
Hardships & Sacrifices
I kind of sacrificed my social life, not necessarily in a unhealthy way (I lived with my family at the time and had two brothers to keep me going) but not going as much as I could have and spending more time with people. I dropped out of college 3 years in (majored in Graphic Design) and took a job across the country away from all of my family and friends - that was incredibly rough.
The hardest thing was beginning/early stages and getting a good portfolio going. My work was rough and not interesting and I wasn't interested in it and I decided to make a change. I sat down and tried to figure out what my problem was, I realized that I was making random things/environments for my portfolio that I was comfortable with & meaning or any interest JUST to have something in my portfolio and to hope that X studio would like it or if it would fit their games (I feel that is a common thing for starters) and therefore my work suffered. I eventually just jumped in and started to create things I was passionate about/interested in without thinking about who it would be good for, did it for myself and most importantly was out of my comfort-zone doing things I haven't done before and I noticed an incredible improvement - It was a challenge and I had struggles and had to keep pushing and work hard but it came together in the end.I seemed to have learned & picked things up quickly as well along the way.
So my advice is to create things you're passionate about ,step out of your comfort-zone and don't just create things to have things but create things because you want to and love to, do it for yourself to get better and not try to please specific studios/people, just do it and people with be pleased on their own.
Inspirations
I'm inspired by nature and whats around me, also looking at concept, threads on Polycount both 3d & 2d, and people at work. Game development-wise - just help create games and see people get excited, enjoy them and be happy but also see people interact with the work you've created.
Where did this all get me?
Hard work, dedication and passion got me to get my first job at Crytek USA which was just the beginning. Things didn't really work out there... ehem... BUT I don't regret it at all because I met amazing people and learned a lot. I somehow got my dream job early in my career at Bethesda Game Studios... I still don't think it's sunken in yet that I work at my favorite/dream studio :poly124:
Sorry for my life story lol.
It wasn't a progressive thing, some things just suddenly clicked and I improved quite quickly.
didn't really work out though - not really sure if I want to work in games now, but still love the whole game art thing - It's like an addiction that i don't want to quit.
yep so much this
at school i had no clue what to do later on, something with art, maybe something with 3d which i have been doing a bit back then. I did some modding stuff for counterstrike, horrible horrible stuff
My memory might be bending the truth in the next part haha
So I ended up in a german counterstrike community, many germany here know the place. So i posted up my work, and got flamed by some dude nicknamed Carny, who was pretty famous at the time to do his character for the BenderMod
http://cs1.gamemodding.net/posts/2013-06/67683900_1371535588_65419262_de_dust0000.jpg
a mod played by many many people back in the days, so yeah him and I have been fighting for I dunno lets say ages.
And somehow got used to it, like an old couple.
So there is this guy levels above me, and he just quit school to work in a studio in Berlin and he didn't know many people in Berlin, so we met one day.
It's not getting romantic, sorry about that, but a bit of bromance will always be there....
So we met a few times, and he asked me if i would like to come by the studio he works at and test the game they are working on, sure thing, playing games... my thing!
So I was there, played this bugfest (sorry guys it was
We used our freetime to do speed modelling sessions on his machine, 1 hour, or 20 minutes each just doing one thing going to the next. There was this modelling video online (online was very new back then) by Irfan Celik, a timelapsed video [ame]
we both have been pretty bad at english, so we never knew what timelapsed means and we we trained HARD to get as fast as he was, we never knew he used scripts either. Btw scripts I still use in the current version of max today.
So yeah we never quite matched it But we got close 20 Minutes maybe to get this type of model pumped out back then, learning shortcuts, speeding up our game.
So yeah after a while I asked his boss if i could do an internship at their place. And luckily i just won one of those fancy german Animago Awards for one of my 3d characters which might have helped a bit to get the internship.
So this is how i got in pretty much, still thank you Hanno without you might still work in some graphic design workshop in the middle of nowhere