KS3 Art and design: A career as a computer game designer

I get a lot of inspiration from travel, you know, as you see these kind of landscapes just flash by.

Architecture inspires me a lot… I’m thinking about how things kind of inhabit those spaces and what story it could tell. Where could that be or who could live in there and what could they do in it? And then you can go away and recreate it.

I am an artist in video games. So I create everything you see. Everything you can think of that goes in a game visually speaking.

So we are a micro game development studio. There’s just five of us. And we’ve been doing this for two years now. We came straight out of university having all of us met there doing games or graphic design or similar things.

We came straight out of university and won a student competition which allowed us to kind of get a bit of funding and then we were able to begin making our first proper game.

Our level designer or the game designer will give me his vision for what the space is and what game play happens in there. But then it’s my job to kind of bring them to life in terms of the visuals. So I’ll be given, you know, walls that are just white cubes. So I need to decide, you know, what architectural style are they going to be? What kind of buildings?

I’ve been playing games since the Sega Megadrive when I was four years old… It’s always been like a really huge hobby, a really big part of my life, erm, it was just only realising that I could do it as a job came when I was much older.

And when you’ve got your picture that you want to try and recreate. You know, you’re just working towards it slowly, kind of methodically.

My experiences of art in school were somewhat limited. I didn’t do a GCSE or A Level so once I’d finished doing it in Year 9 that was the end for me. I just was kind of doing the game stuff or game related things just as a hobby. So I’d get home from school and that would be like, oh great I’m home from school so now I’ve got time to do this which is just a bit of fun.

And then gradually just started working with people my age online, to like put stuff in games and edit things that were already in games. I then started to realise I could make my own stuff. And the closer I got to university, I realised it was actually a viable thing. You could actually get paid to do this and I was enjoying it so it seemed natural to kind of just progress in to it.

So I had to have A Levels to go to university but they were just kind of base line grades. They didn’t mind what it was in, but you had to have a good portfolio… I just kind of did my portfolio in my spare time.

So I pretty much finished a building for the level. It looks very nice but it’s just lacking that fine detail especially not understanding yet, what kind of texture it’s going to have. You know, whether it’s concrete or brick. So I’m going to go out now and try and find some more detailed real world examples.

I kind of see parts of it as being an artist but then there’s so much design. There’s so much thought about a product, it is a piece of art but you do want to sell it. So compared to just, you know, putting paint on a canvas it can be anything you want it to be and you have that kind of freedom. This is more like targeted.

So now I’ve pretty much got the building how we want it to look. And it’s looking pretty good. So we’ll start the process now. I’m starting to replace all these boring cubes with the building. And then the whole process of making a level really is just doing that for every object you can think of. So if there’s a horrible blocky car cube we go and make a nice looking car. Go and research the car and then we’ll replace those cubes with the finished model.

The tools for making a game can seem quite complex. We’re just drawing in general and just keeping thinking about art and keeping creating stuff of any sort is just a great way in to games I think.