Too much of an artist - Not enough employee?
polycounter lvl 15
I feel not enough emphasis is put on the fact that as a game developer, you are an employee, and as an employee, you are responsible for doing quality work in the most efficient, effective way possible.
Gav posted this the other day and got me thinking:
@GavinGoulden - "What do you put first? Game Dev? Artist? Or a healthy mix of both? Maybe a sprinkle of third mysterious option?"
Maybe too many people focus on an idea of perfection that is by no means bad, but should maybe be the mindset for personal work and not professional, when time is money. There is obviously a balance, but how many people keep that balance in the back of their minds while working, and realize that maybe they are noodling on something for too long?
How do people learn that getting to 90-95% quality as quick as possible is the most important thing, and that eventually you are experiencing diminishing returns and that last 5-10% is costing the company too much money for too little return.
I'm curious to see how people respond to this.
Gav posted this the other day and got me thinking:
@GavinGoulden - "What do you put first? Game Dev? Artist? Or a healthy mix of both? Maybe a sprinkle of third mysterious option?"
Maybe too many people focus on an idea of perfection that is by no means bad, but should maybe be the mindset for personal work and not professional, when time is money. There is obviously a balance, but how many people keep that balance in the back of their minds while working, and realize that maybe they are noodling on something for too long?
How do people learn that getting to 90-95% quality as quick as possible is the most important thing, and that eventually you are experiencing diminishing returns and that last 5-10% is costing the company too much money for too little return.
I'm curious to see how people respond to this.
Replies
if all the professionals compromised then there would be no exceptional art from the professional spectrum.
if anything there is too much compromise in both pro work and personal work spectrum. i know i am never 100% or even 90% satisfied with anything i create whether personal or professional.
I've heard the term "infinite revision cycles" mentioned a few times. This is when the artist/studio/client continuously requests revisions for the project to the point of it becoming financially dangerous. It's often a partial cause of studios closures and is another reason why deadlines are so important. At some point you have to say "Yeah, that would have been cool... maybe next time."
Deadlines aren't particularly stressed on forums (with exception to challenges) because the vast majority of work shown is personal. People are setting their own deadlines if at all and it's when artists have a chance to really push their skills.
Having said all of that, if you walk through some of the best games you can think of, and really look at characters and environments, you'll see small imperfections everywhere, they just get lost in the gestalt of the game.
That's why tech art settings standards and guidelines and defining workflow is so important, to keep this stuff in check. Otherwise inefficiency will just run rampant.
You can spend hours on polishing this one single thing to be super quality, but in the end it is lost in grand scheme of things, if you don't particularly expose it.
Besides look at different games. Does Skyrim have super high quality assets. Or Age of Conan. Or The Secret World. Or Guild Wars 2 ?
No. They don't. But it doesn't matter, because when everything is put together it sums up and give overall good quality.
It might be sad but in ratio time/quality. Usually time is more important. That is why tools that can procedurally generate something are employed en masse. To save as much time as possible.
An environment goes through several stages: LD blockout, Enviro Art first pass using only gameplay elements with large to medium detail, planned out and prepared with proper COL and material details etc etc.
At some point you can feel that you're slowing down in your progress of your environment (since you can't move to texturing or detailing). It's probably during this time it's a good thing to move on to something else and make sure that the next area gets to the same quality. At least until ART hits the next stage of development.
Obviously it also depends on what kind of game you're making, but even if you're making one level for the whole production, you also divide that one level into several stages of gameplay.
Professional work quality is always going to be defined by time unless you've got oodles of money lol.
I like to set later polish phases for characters further down the line, so I can come back to them after a couple others with fresh eyes. Altho this isn't really applicable to peeps who freelance.
There's alot of planning involved with "what would be nice" vs "what is neccessary". So "Idealy I'd like to do it this way but given the time constraints I'd have to do it that way instead" etc.
But as a fan of the series extra credits one thing has become even more plainly obvious than when I first started modding games over 10 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDjrOaoHz9s fail faster.
@MM - Should the exceptional art or workflows/techniques that push the quality bar to new levels be developed during a project? Or between projects?
What kind of scenario or stressors push an artist to blast through their current quality ceiling? Can it be reproduced regularly or is it spontaneous?
Here at work I try to set goals, and discuss goals of what we want to accomplish as the big picture. What it is that we want to push, is it feasible, and what are the pros and cons. This generally happens in pre-production tho. Knowing this really helps me be more adaptable down the line and be better prepared.
If i find myself in a slow week while we wait for new project to start, then i try to push new tech, or new pipelines that will make art better on the whole. Anything that i work on has to have some kind of impact or positive result for the company and the project. It's not just about making art, its about making art that works well with the game.
Last thing... i guess just learn as you go through your day, and learn from previous work. I think that's how you push your art to get better. Not by investing more time into making art more detailed. But learning how to manage, and think what works best for you when you approach your work. Maybe that's why people that have more experience don't feel so overwhelmed when confronted with a big deadline.
Anyways... just some thoughts.
PS... also.. when in doubt ask questions... good art director and leads will always be available to clarify goals you might have.
Right now most progress come from rendering tech tbh. The most beautiful games come from good Art Direction and the wholeness of scenes not individual props.
If you're the sort of artist that is incredibly fast, efficient AND have time to make the best art you can possibly make then yeah, you're a very rare talent.
In most cases you just have to make things to a decent level and hope you get enough polish time by the end of it xD In my experience I've never really had the time to push the art to the quality I want by myself, I always get asked to do other things, help other people or start on other locations. As a team tackling an environment together you can make some kickass things, but it will almost always be some other artist that will touch your stuff and then it's not completely yours anymore.
Never before seen standards usually happens in portfolio projects =P Looking at the most beautiful games out there now is mostly teams of artists doing tech-demos and things that won't show up in the real-game etc.
It mostly boils down to artists being too constrained by the game itself to do any actual breakthroughs. Like Gears of War, beautiful games but all covers and environments are boxy just because of the cover-mechanics. They need to meet a certain metric and need to read well in the environment for gameplay etc. Can't be too wide, can't be to shallow, can't be jagged, it'll make the aim animation clip through the cover etc etc etc.
It's a game, it's more important that you deliver a constant quality and get the game out the door than pushing the art. That's where the wholeness of quality comes in.
I'd love if artists got free-reign at all times, but I bet the games would suffer pretty badly xD
Majority of the exceptional digital art comes from personal works. Even beyond the art field, majority of ground breaking technology come from people doing it on their own in personal time. That should tell you there is something wrong when they cannot do the same in commercial professional projects or under a big company with tight deadline, constant marketing annoyance, etc.
Corporate business usually never helps innovation, it only cares about money and short term profit.
As I said before, my observation is there are too many professional artists settling for "good enough" and making excuses like "cost saving" etc.
I see too many people saying stuff like "dreamy artists" and "realistic goals" etc. etc. It is almost the norm to compromise and not push for quality.
Quality should be pushed constantly, during a project and between projects. As long as you care for the work you are doing you should push for quality.
Sure, but only as long as that push doesn't come at the expense of work-life balance. Too often when people talk about "pushing for perfection" and all these things it means working 12 hour days etc just to keep up appearances. Work smarter, not harder/longer.
At the end of the day it is a job, and sometimes it is ok for a job to be just a job, not your way of life. Theres too much bullshit in this industry, like layoffs, project cancellations etc that can happen regardless if you are personally pushing for perfection every day, so there needs to be an emotional disconnect there IMO, or else you just burn out.
As far as production balance goes, it always takes much more than 10% effort to reach that final 10$ in quality, many times it is simply not worth it. Especially when your target audience will never notice the difference. I know I've personally put too much effort into details that were never really noticed in game, so I think its really healthy to always keep an eye on the big picture. Every asset in the game does not need to be an amazing work of art, overall art direction is much, much more important to the end result than zbrushing details on every prop in the game.
'It'll do' was the reply and that stuck with me. To me it just looked wrong and would have been worth spending a few extra hours on.
absolutely!
but keep in mind that balancing everything does not usually produce anything exceptional. when you balance everything you cannot cross the limit in anything because well you are balancing everything.
there are some geniuses who can balance everything and still be exceptionally good at what they do, but those people are also exceptions.
in general, you have to sacrifice some to gain something exceptional. in general you cannot be exceptional if you balance everything. that is just simple logic as far as i see it.
Deadlines override your desire to noodle towards perfection.
I suppose, however I think more often than not exceptionalism comes from a group effort, my favorite games are not the ones with the most detailed art assets, but generally the ones with the most immerse universes. You can take a game like bioshock 1 and really run over it with a fine tooth comb and find all sorts of assets that could have been made better, but would it have resulted in a better product? If so, likely only slightly better and certainly not proportional to the amount of effort it would require.
Often individual artists doing insanely detailed work can be a detriment to a project, as you'll get character artists spending 1-2 months on individual characters, zbrushing every wrinkle, fold, and pore, but not to say this only happens with character art. Generally, if you give an artist a longer deadline, they tend to fill that time focusing on very small details instead of finishing it off to the required quality level and moving on to the next task. This is an issue I've seen at multiple studios (and heard from others at many more studios).
So really, I don't see individual exceptionalism as the key to creating great games or products, and really I don't even see it as directly related.
i guess we are talking about different things. i am not really talking about endless iteration, or obsessing over details that no one will see. it should be common sense to be practical in that way to work smart and only to the extent you have to.
what i was really talking about was in general i see lot of professional artists not caring enough about anatomy, color theory, lighting, art direction ie. art in general.
Ah ok, I thought we were basically talking about the differences between very good or great art content, and exceptional art content.
If we're talking about more basic stuff I totally agree.
If the difference is between barely passable and good enough, I think everyone should always push to be putting out content that is at least good enough. But this gets a bit subjective as always, how do we really define what these terms mean?
even if the qualified person is there to lead other artists, they are miss-managed by the business itself to care less about the art and more about completing the game in time and making profit.
you dont have to spend more time or more money to make good art in games. there are many studios out there who can prove that. you just have to care enough about the art in the game and not just making money. in the end, good art will often inspire rest of the team to create an amazing experience and will eventually sale well. but there are too many factors influencing financial success of a game. now days having just enough profit is never enough, you have to make more profit than ever before or else you lay off everyone and shut the studio. i hate to bring corporatism to this discussion, but i see it as a problem like any other creative industry.
I know of a manager/director who once put a sign on his door that said "Done is better than perfect", which is not on its own inaccurate. That being said, anyone with any amount of knowledge in the company knew this to actually mean, "Get it out the door, we'll patch it later if it's still worth the money." Enough people looking to impress were ok with this mentality, and the quality of games dropped over the years.
"Time is money" they say. Except they're not actually keeping track of time. They're not keeping track of the time it takes someone else to fix their mistakes, etc. For some reason managers tend to think dev cycles will take less time than they need, and patch/polish cycles will take 5 times longer than they need and the latter never happens as a result.
That's getting a little off track, but I'm sure people can relate. It's definitely an issue to be aware of. Something I've been struggling with in the recent past, "what counts as done", that sort of thing. But what happens more often - someone putting too much care into their work? Or people not hitting that 90-95% of what could/should be done, but wanting to be anyway (to impress managers/coworkers/laziness/what have you).
That being said, while I do think we need more people to push for quality on account of many people doing the opposite, I don't think they should push aside their personal lives and work 12 hour days to do it. I think it's more of an employee/manager balancing act.
production = ok doesnt have to be perfect, as long as everything on schedule should be fine.
near deadline/end of project = omgwtf, panic!, cut some feature and content whatever you can to get it done.
repeat.
-- :phehe j/k
btw I dont know if this is related or not , but i think its quite good article , the truth about concept art:
http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/2014/02/lets-get-real-concept-art/
lots of artist, may actually been exposed to unrealistic expectation, and misinterpretation.
It is so crazy you brought that up cause i read it the other day, how things tie into each-other sometimes, it is pretty neat and it is so true, i learned that myself just recently you don't just come up with a great idea it takes time and different concepts mashed together to come up with something decent.
Though i think only a few people can come up with a great idea with no outside influences. That is why i feel sometimes the "stars/highly awed artists" have outside help before posting their amazingly "Perfect works", a.k.a. private critiques before public critiques, if that makes sense, shown to a few technical eyes that have viewed the design and have already corrected any possible mistakes/flaws, ect, ect.
I find it nearly impossibly for someone to keep creating amazing pieces without this, no one else is doing it, so i highly doubt it, that is just me. -My opinion.