The games industry is an interesting one, as the largest
entertainment industry the scale at which games are produce varies from a
single individual to multiple teams consisting of near a thousand people. Due
to this a diverse job market has grown allowing for the jack of all trades to
highly specialist artist of a single facet. At first this may be intimidating
for an artist, or any individual, wishing to break into the industry but it
allows for near limitless opportunities. To really simplify this I'll be
looking at the role differences in working for a AAA production and an indie
one.
The former and it's more specialist job roles has been a growing
trend in the industry as games have grown in scope and technological
complexity. With the eve of every generation teams gave been required to grow
to accommodate the new hardware resulting in developers falling into more
specialist and defined roles within their teams. Let's take the Halo series
as an example, the first in the trilogy, Combat Evolved, was
released in 2001 and was developed by around 100 people. In contrast Halo 3
which came out a mere six years and three generations later had a workforce
of 300ish to see it to completion. (I counted from a list those numbers
may not be the most accurate). Below I've linked a video Bungie, the studio
behind Halo
released which details the growth and role changes within the studios. The video is a couple of years old and Bungie has continued to grow as has the niche roles required for their team. Even from the credits from Halo:CE and 3 the more specialist job roles are there.
This was not always the caser and it's seems the industry has almost come full
circle in that respect as independent games have seen a large boost in
publicity and popularity. As team sizes have shrank dramatically it is an
absolute necessity that artists can work across a number of disciplines and to
a competent level. For instance in a AAA studio a character artist may only
need to model a character before handing it over for another artist to texture,
one to sort out any issues within the model and then on to an animator and then
some one to import into engine, the number of artists in this pipeline maybe be
an indie studio in it's entirety. Obviously this calls for smarter use
of artists or programmers whose skills extended past a single aspect, what
they want is "T-shaped" workers. What this refers to is an indivual
with an expertise in one area but has an ability or understanding
across multiple, for instance an environment artist may focus on
landscapes but can model foliage, use and create systems such as lighting or
effects in engine and perhaps a small knowledge of programming on the side. Of course this isn't an exclusive demand from the indie community Valve explicitly look for this within their own employees and I think it's safe to assume that most companies will look for artist like this.
Like I aid before the opportunities that the games industry allows is fantastic, if you want to specialize in modelling weaponry you can or if you want to do a little bit of everything you can too. Personally I'd be less inclined to hugely specialise myself as I enjoy working on a variety of different disciplines and over the past months have been exploring VFX and GUI as well as continue to push myself with the character and environment works of the course. It seems to me that the creative industry are far to interesting to commit exclusively to a single discipline however to fit into the bigger picture in games, film or visualisation this may need to be sacrificed to a degree.
Sources:
Halo.Wikia
Wikipedia
Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc-6u8GCyVA
Valve
Employer's Handbook
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