I am currently in university studying computer animation course (we study the whole pipeline, including programming). I want to get into games industry and so I am learning Unreal as much as I can. However, currently I am trying to put my portfolio together and I am struggling since I don’t seem to specialize in anything (probably because I don’t know what to specialize in, in the first place). So I wanted to ask some questions regarding the game career path:
What kind of skills are most wanted in the games industry?
I was looking into becoming a Technical Artist; what kind of stuff would you show in your portfolio?
I possibly have an opportunity to open my own indie game studio after I graduate and I wonder whether it is better to try to get a job first in other company or go start on your own.
If you are already a Game Developer or work in industry, let me know how you got there!
Also, any general advice will be extremely helpful and highly appreciated!
Thanks
What kind of skills are most wanted in the games industry? Irrelevant to the topic and there are talks/videos aplenty about this - however Technical Artists are pretty strongly desired to my knowledge. Unfortunately you’ll end up designing a lot of tools to support the animators, and artists, so if this is not something you enjoy - pick another avenue.
I was looking into becoming a Technical Artist; what kind of stuff would you show in your portfolio? Tools creation, especially stuff that automates tasks that artists perform. An auto rigging tool would probably get you an interview, then sell yourself and your in. Additional ‘stuff’ to show in a tech art reel, rigging is of course required knowledge, a custom built character customizer, with swappable everything would be impressive.
I possibly have an opportunity to open my own indie game studio after I graduate and I wonder whether it is better to try to get a job first in other company or go start on your own. This is a toss up question - and strongly depends upon the situation, and people involved. To note - if you are starting up a studio - you won’t be working much on game development right away. Studio setup takes time, focus, energy money and, time. Check out a Don Daglow talk from GDC vault 2015 - awesome talk very relevant to this question. The talk is titled Going Indie… or something related.
Thank you for your detailed reply! Will have a look at this talk I think all you’ve said is absolutely truth (well by looking how other people made it through). One thing what makes things difficult for me is the fact that you need to specialise and quite early on. I enjoy every bits of game prodcution (well ususally) and have no idea where to go. Technical Artists are of course great because they encompass lots of areas (art and tech), but after all it is just another area that seems interesting to me. I guess I need to try more stuff out in the end.
