Tips for Video Game Artists

  I'll start by saying I'm stoked to see an article about the (former) art director from Rockstar Games! Rockstar is easily one of my favorite game companies so I was hooked on this article from the get-go. His first piece of advice was to know trends, but to be original, if you just copy what's popular you'll be forgotten, people won't buy what they already own. There's a pretty good example of this in looking at Medal of Honor, a blatant Call of Duty clone that was quickly forgotten do to it's lack of any charm or originality. However, Battlefield stays relevant by being different with a more realistic style and impressive destruction physics (with the exception of  Betafield 4). He also said that you should do you best regardless of the platform, and being visually impressive doesn't mean hyper-realism. Stylistic graphics can actually be better, look at Sly Cooper and Halo 2, Halo 2's graphics were astounding when it came out, now they're aged and unimpressive, while Sly Cooper's older, less advanced graphics that look like a 3-d animated movie are still charming and enjoyable. More recently, when I saw Skyrim's graphics I was dumbfounded, but now the impressiveness is just average, but Sunset Overdrive with an unimpressive 900p and 30 FPS looks stunning with it's cartoonish coloring and atmosphere that makes me infinity more ready to move to new-gen consoles more than any hyper-realistic looking game with high resolution and FPS that'll wind up just being half-decent in 2 years. He also said in mobile gaming it's important to get as many people hooked to the game as possible to be successful. He should put in his game descriptions it was made by Rockstar's art director, I'd by that game in a heartbeat. He then talked about his focus on something we love but never quite mention: details. It's the little details that make a game's atmosphere feel alive like the adoring fans in Saints Row 3, the malfunctioning machines in Halo ODST, the poncho flutering in Red Dead Redemption, and pretty much everything in Grand Theft Auto V with the NPCs conversations, the suit jacket's realistic sway, drivers flipping you off, women getting scared when Trevor creepily follows them around. Yeah, without those subtle things the game just isn't quite as life-consuming, physics over graphics, that's what I'm saying. He also talked about the importance of risk-taking and experimentation, otherwise you do the same thing over and over expecting it to change, that my friend, is insanity. Look at Call of Duty ,that pushes out the same turd every year, then look at Saint's Row, the only consistency being the purple clad Third Street Saints, in a series of adventures getting more and more intense. Then Bowden ended with reminding everyone to be humble, cause there's always someone better. Which is true, as much as I love Rockstar, Bethesda is still my all-time favorite gaming company. I like video games. A lot. A whole lot.