Hi Neil,
I read your post, and the first thing that occurred to me is to check out your portfolio site to see if you actually are any good. You are. You need more work in your portfolio as it is quite small at this point but your quality is spot on, so you can lay the “am I good enough” worries to rest. However, ultimately though being good enough quality wise is important (bare minimum credential for entry into the game-art-job market) it is far from the only thing. In a way, you’ve already realized your problem from what you said in your post. Your problem is not quality, but supply side economics. I’m going to break this down for you into bad news, and good news.
Bad news first:
You see, when you said “Like everyone on the internet these days, I’m an art student…” you self identified your problem. There are a truly dizzying number of objectively very talented artists who want to work in the games industry. Conversely there are objectively relatively few actual jobs for artist in the games industry when taken as a portion of sufficiently technically skilled artists. Because of basic supply and demand, this means those who have the jobs to offer can and will demand extremely high quality of work, pay relatively low wages, demand extreme working conditions and hours (family life? Free time? Yeah, right), and largely get away with it. This condition will not be changing any time soon, as there is truly a glut of artists in the market. Worsening the situation, ever more artists are being churned out of colleges who make their money by charging students for classes regardless of if those classes are likely to enable that student to ever pay back the money they had to borrow to take them.
The situation is further complicated by the “best selling author effect”. The most likely predictor an author will write a best seller is weather or not they’ve written a best seller before. Writers who have already published best sellers are actually more than 900% (no, that’s not a made up number) more likely to write another than a published writer that hasn’t already made the best seller list. How does this apply to you you wonder? It’s the “shipped title effect” for game artists. The most likely indicator that you will get a job doing art in the games industry is weather you have a shipped title to your credit or not. If you have a shipped title under your belt, potential employers can objectively judge your work quality, have the peace of mind knowing you’ve already created work good enough to sell, and posses the professionalism to get a job done. Of course, this leads to the inevitable chicken and egg situation. How to get a shipped title to your credit without having one?
Okay, doom and gloom over, here’s the good news:
First, you’re still a student, so your final skill set is not yet fixed. If I could make a strong recommendation it would be to get some technical skills worked into your ed plan as well as art skills. Learning to program in Perl, Python, Java and even Action Script are not only going to make you stand out from other artist, but drastically open up the pool of potential jobs you can take. If all you can do is model, rig, texture and animate (not that that is a small skill set), that opens up about four or five jobs in the game industry for you. However if you also have strong coding skills, you have a lot more options. In fact the options increase exponentially. Now you can also work as a technical director, a rigger, work in the tools department, you’re just a lot more versatile. Frankly, even if a company only wants you as an artist, the’re more likely to take you over someone with no programming ability just because they know they may well be able to move you into a different department later on, giving them flexibility, and you the chance to broaden your experience. I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but Sony used to require all their artist be able to script in Perl, it was so fundamental to their pipeline.
Second, hopefully, you’re not living on your own yet. That gives you flexibility, and potentially the ability to overcome the “Best selling author” paradox. If you are living at home, make a point of doing freelance work while you’re not entirely engrossed in school, such as on your summer breaks. Price yourself lower than market rate for professional artists (you’re still a student not yet a professional), find a good solid project that has some funding, and work for them. That way, once you’re out of school, you could potentially have not just one but perhaps two or three shipped titles under your belt and some solid references for a future employer to check. You don’t need to live on the money right now while you’re a student, so consider any forgone wages an investment in your career. A caveat here would be I strongly dis-recommend working for free. Projects that are being produced with no budget whatsoever, or “on shares only” rarely actually see the light of day. If they can’t afford to pay their people something they’re probably neither serious enough or professional enough to actually bring a product to market. There are exceptions to this, but they are rare.
Last, make connections while you’re a student and work them. When I’m hiring, I do a lot of this in my day job, if I get a recommendation from someone who already works for me, I’m much more inclined to give the recommended candidate a good hard look than someone who just blew in off the street. Keep in touch with all the other art students, and also the computer science students you’ll meet while you’re taking those programming classes. Your personal network is your ace in the hole, and perhaps the thing most likely to land you your first job. It happens frequently that one person gets on somewhere, and a while later three or four of his classmates are working there too. It’s not coincidence.
Don’t get discouraged, but do have a clear eyed understanding of what you’re going into and what the things that are most likely to increase your odds of success are. Raising your chances is going to involve learning some things you may not have planned for originally. That may be uncomfortable, but isn’t it better to accept the pain of changing trajectories to one with a higher chance of success than continuing on doggedly with one that has a much lower chance? Also, feel free to drop me a PM next time you have a block of free time to dedicate to a project. I may have some freelance work for you or know someone who does. Alternatively, you could always offer your services on the “commercial work” forum. Plenty of indie developers (unlike the big boys) are willing to take a chance on a promising student that offers indie friendly rates. Particularly if you have a couple references (there’s that damn chicken and egg again…) Best of luck and be well!