Notes from GDC 2015 - Jacob Sumrow

Post date: Mar 19, 2015 5:4:18 PM

1. Computer generated art is not how we lose jobs. It's how we get them. I attended several talks while at GDC last week. Former Ringling Grad Michael Pavlovich working at Certain Affinity gave a talk about how they have been streamlining their processes with materials created in Substance Painter, making UVing an entirely automated function, and constantly tweaking their tools for automated decimation of meshes. An artist from Insomniac Games gave a talk on how they streamlined their materials to only needing a tiling base material, metal for example, and and a material for trim pieces and used those two materials across the entire game world (2 materials for all metal, 2 for all bare wood, 2 for all painted wood, etc.) And then used cloud maps to generate all the vertex painting instead of doing it by hand. "Do Artists Dream of Electric Sheep?" was a talk given by an artist working with programmers on creating a system to randomly yet believably generate art for 14 Quintillion Planets. Which is rather terrifying. With all the automated tools, many of them accessible to everyone, I was afraid that it would be harder to get noticed as an artist. After emailing the previously mentioned Michael Pavlovich after his talk, it seems that studios now are looking for artists who know how to do things the easy way, not the old way. Embrace the new tools, know how to use them, and if you really want to be badass (and know how to do it. I don't) try and build and edit a few tools of your own.

2. As a corollary to the above, it would not be a bad idea to make a few base materials for your project BEFORE UVing your models. The more you can reuse your materials the more unified your spaces will look and the less memory you will use. I recommend checking the GDC Vault for the Insomniac Games talk "The Ultimate Trim"

3. For some games gameplay is not the most important thing (And that's OK.) Not the most important point on here but definitely important to know before you start making real games. In "The Art of Monument Valley" The speaker described multiple decisions that followed this logic. The art was the first thing pitched about the game, the gameplay came after. The game was intentionally short, and intentionally easy, because they wanted to make the game accessible to non-gamers. Keep your options open.