Job Experiance
polycounter lvl 9
Hey all, simple question I still have yet to break in and every job wants experience or shipped games. Usually when i apply i get an answer like good portfolio but you do not have the required experience, how do you get experience if every employer wants experience ?
Replies
Also, don't let the experience requirements sway you. A lot of the time, they are only there to deter those who arent confident enough in their abilities. If you`re good enough, they`ll hire you regardless... Not every time, but ya.
Can you put a mod project on resume ?
Of course experience with modding and such helps with experience, but what you really need to do is knock people's socks off with your portfolio so that they can overlook the lack of experience.
Of course knowing people who can vouch for you helps as well.
Whether or not you got paid for work or were in a "professional" setting isn't really relevant from an art standpoint. If they want to know how much professional experience you have they're probably already going to look at your resume.
As it is your portfolio is kind of a great big frame for how little experience you have, instead of a showcase for what kind of work you can do.
Once you have at least one job on your resume - and you haven't been fired from the place for incompetence - the studio can assume that you've been trained to deal with all this and you've proven yourself capable.
Many of the usual job openings are for positions that the studio needs to fill as quickly as possible, because they have to deal with a workload beyond their current capabilities. This means that the department's lead wants someone that can be put in front of a computer and is able to deliver assets within a very short time, without requiring extensive training that would take the lead's attention away from the ongoing production and the other artists. This means that a complete beginner would actually decrease the department's output for weeks or even months, before it can rise above the previous level - and that's something that today's schedules can not accommodate for.
So if you're a beginner, you have better chances at a studio that's just starting to staff up for a large production, when even the in-house crew needs to be educated about the workflow and technical requirements and thus it can still afford the extra effort to train you. Once full production kicks in, it's safer to hire someone who has already demonstrated an ability to actually build stuff under such requirements.
You should also keep in mind that we're at a (pretty hard) time when many studios are closed and thus there's a lot of experienced artists without a job to hire from time to time. These guys will always be preferred over beginners even if they require a bigger salary, as it's almost guaranteed that they can be put in front of a workstation and start to produce usable assets within a few weeks or days. It's also easier to reach out for some experienced freelancers or an outsource studio to quickly ramp up the production output, especially if the studio already has a solid process to work with them.
Competing with such alternatives is almost impossible for a newbie even with signs of talent and a good portfolio. There's no guarantee that you can deliver - whereas freelancers or outsource studios can offer an extensive portfolio of previous works, and they also don't require office space and software and hardware purchases which might be more complicated to acquire compared to a contractor.
So, the best option is to forget about all your ambitions for your first industry job. Get your feet into any place you can, even if they only produce some free-to-play facebook game or something even less appreciated, just to get at least 6-10 months of actual production experience.
One of my pals from here (Hungary) has spent a LOT of money on airplane tickets to get interviews at little known game studios in London - but once he was there, his next job was at MPC on Harry Potter 3. Now he's a lighting supe at Weta, worked on everything from Kong and Avatar and Hobbit and whatever you can imagine. All it took was to be willing to accept a low level job in the UK (although he had some local game dev experience that helped him to get that job, too). Very few people are good enough to land a first job at an AA studio, most of us have to pay their dues before getting there.
You've spent a few days or weeks to get you educated on the project, its art direction and technical requirements, and you've submitted your first work in progress asset for review and received a list of feedback.
Many things can go wrong immediately:
- Your stuff is a complete mess, because your portfolio of personal work wasn't an actual representation of your capabilities. Maybe you've cheated by stealing or buying the work of a lesser known artist, maybe you've copied stuff, maybe you've been given significant help by a much more experienced guy, or maybe it took you a year to get that model to look right.
- You simply fail to properly interpret the concept art and the references, and can't even see what's missing.
- Your stuff looks good but the technical side is so messed up that it'd take a lot of extra work to be put into the rest of the pipeline (faulty meshes, textures that don't work with the shaders, scene files full of bad nodes and groups, every piece having pages of construction history and/or transforms etc.)
- You've never taken critique before and your completely paralyzed, believing you're a mess and unable to rework the asset.
- You're completely convinced that your stuff is good as it is and you simply refuse to change it as the feedback requires.
- You take a LOT more time to get your stuff up to the standards compared to the other guys in the department.
And so on. The point is that you will take a lot more attention and resources and time to produce something usable compared to the rest of the crew and thus you end up holding back the production, instead of increasing its output.
Also, the studio has already invested a lot of money and time to get you up to speed, which would all go to waste if for some reason you end up not working out for them.
Once you've been working professionally somewhere, the risk of running into one of the above is much smaller as the employer can rightly assume that you've already faced these situations and have managed to deal with them well. But if you're a beginner, it's much more likely that you've never dealt with any of these situations and thus there's a good chance that one of them will happen. Murphy's law dictates that it'll be the worst possible case, and no department lead would want to face that - they're much more likely to explore any other options instead of facing the unknown.
It seems like giving an art test would answer many of the points you brought up.
I completely agree with Varga. I am lead env on a aaa console title atm, and one of the problems we face with delivered assets, is that their technical specs are not good enough. Everything might look great etc, but it doesnt implement well enough, is too expensive, have too many drawcalls, unoptimized lightmaps or collisions, or not easily reusable modular textures and so on.
Showing beautiful stuff is imo only half the battle. Technical knowledge, workflow and pipeline is imo just as important, and as Tamas says, there is simply a much higher chance that an experienced artist can do that.
The real reason that your not getting work is,(and this is just being honest here) is NOT lack of experience... its the lack of solid work on your portfolio. This is real cause for concern. As I am seeing this, you have now been out of school for four years, (B.S., Game Art & Design, Illinois Institute of Art – Schaumburg - Spring 2010) and the work on your site, will not get you a job. It really is, very simple low poly assets, (textures need much improvement) that can be outsource with better results.
what your doing.
maybe try something like this?
Mod communities are wonderful, and I would recommend them to anyone. Still, make sure that the community is challenging, and the assets worth your while. After all your portfolio is what will get your foot in the door.
I would suggest focusing on your portfolio, and creating some really challenging assets/environments. Work within an engine. get awesome showcase pieces.
The thing is, you have so many awesome artists around you nowadays, that you can set your standards pretty far to better yourself. Get to work !
I'm going to give it this year work really hard and see what happens. I need to clean my portfolio from scratch a lot of mixed quality assets
Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
Your going to fine. Its more or less following a pretty straight forward path; most of it is "wash, rinse, repeat" but you have to follow through.
Come up with a game plan.
post game plan. community reviews game plan, okays it, (or at least feels good about it, and you should too) get to work. post work. community approves work. "wash, rinse, repeat" portfolio is done.
simple just follow through... most important part.