Archived Rare Life Profile: Artist

by Lerako on Apr 2nd, 2012

Someone famous once said, “First impressions last”.

Someone not so famous (me) once said, “The more copies you sell, the more money you make”.

Firstly, most importantly and apart from anything else, it is the artists’ role to create an initial impression of their game that creates a desire to own it in as many people as possible.

Before anyone actually plays your game, before anyone samples the groundbreaking gameplay or the amazing orchestral audio, before they know the story or identify with any of the characters, they will form an impression of the game from a few magazine screenshots or an internet movie that will either draw them in, with a need to know more, or will repel them quicker than a skunk with recently emptied musk glands.

There have been many games that have hidden their immense playability under a layer of sub-standard graphics, and have subsequently slipped into the big game vault in the sky without too many people noticing or caring. The moral? – graphics count.

Although a crucial part of each game, and one that has to be right in terms of style and application, game artistry is not, of course, a lone effort. The average development team at Rare consists of at least 7 artists, each with slightly specialised fields of expertise, but all with large amounts of raw talent and most with a catalogue of stories about their misspent youth – having usually been spent in seedy video arcades or locked in bedrooms drawing on graph paper. Everyone in the graphics department of a team will take on slightly different roles throughout a game’s development, but will generally be focussed on a specific area for which they are responsible. This ranges from concept design work to full-blown environment creation or from front-end design to character building and animation, special effects implementation, 2D sprite and font creation, or the production of magazine and promotional artwork.

It is the nature of each individual game that dictates specifically how artists are utilised. With products like Jet Force Gemini, the focus is heavily skewed towards character creation and animation, because the game design required the characters to perform many different moves. This contrasts with games like Diddy Kong Racing or Mickey’s Speedway USA, where background creation took more artistic resources, the latter games being relatively light in the character animation department.

Obviously, the ideal situation would be for artists to be able to turn their hand to any of the skills required to make the designer’s vision a reality. But as games move closer and closer to achieving a quality of visuals normally reserved for movies and SFX, game art departments have had to evolve to stay on the cutting edge. For Rare this has meant recruiting people with higher levels of specialisation than ever before, with cel animators, non-technical concept artists and graphic designers finding roles in the industry that simply did not exist in years past.

The average game at Rare is in development for around 2 years, some quicker, some longer and some much longer. Throughout that time, the game, and the graphics will (hopefully) evolve from concept to beautifully-realised reality, although it is often not a ride without bumps.

The idea comes first. A rough concept is dreamed up by the designer, lead artist and lead programmer, usually drawing heavily on currently popular and core market ideas. This is then put through the mill of concept design, which hopefully produces suitably appealing characters and style premises for the entire product. There are many technical constraints throughout the development of any game, and it is here that some of the major ones are sifted out. A character has to be designed that will not only look good, but will work with the various design and gameplay elements planned at this stage.

Once some concept art is done, the entire art team can draw on this and begin work in their various, specialised fields, perhaps creating a couple of test characters or backgrounds. This can usually (if the software engineers have been working as hard as the artists) be slotted into a development kit or emulator that will show the team how the graphics will look on the target hardware. Assuming all interested parties see no major shortfalls in the concept, and the team are keen on the tests done so far, the game begins development proper.

The main characters will usually be modelled in full, high-resolution, high-end 3D form with the artist not being particularly concerned with relative expense of the model at this stage. This will be re-modelled later into a ‘cheaper’, workable game model. The environment artists simultaneously begin constructing the first levels for the game, and are usually constrained into a particular method of working by the technicalities of the game engine. All models, whether they be game characters, backgrounds or objects are created with polygonal surfaces – a method of construction that lends itself well to the hardware’s ability to display and manipulate them.

The raw, basically-coloured polygonal ‘meshes’ then undergo texturing. Both characters and environments are textured in roughly the same way, with the artist applying pre-rendered (to maintain a high level of detail) images to the flat, polygonal surfaces. The quality of the textures produced is fundamental to the overall look and attractiveness of the game. A well-textured model will give the player the illusion that they are looking at a much more detailed character (or background) than the underlying polygonal mesh actually contains.

Animators will thread a jointed skeleton through the polygonal characters, giving them the ability to freely manipulate the model, and breath a little life into an otherwise rigid form. The finished textured, jointed and animated character is then placed in the game world, with software written to allow the player to run, jump, punch, roll, drive, fly, shoot etc. around the (by now) fully textured polygonal environment.

And that is more or less it. A little tweaking, a little pixie dust and a lot of sweat later, the game becomes a series of linked environments, with fully playable characters being able to drive, collect, fight or shoot their way through hordes of aliens, dinosaurs, secret agents or would be monkey-‘harmers’ until they reach the goal and the ever-so-important game credits. All this, interspersed with cinematic cut-scenes, nestled on a foundation of top quality front-end control, and set on a bedrock of cohesive graphical style, makes a finished product.

The artist’s job is all but done. As the game begins to see the light at the end of the very dark and very long testing tunnel, there is usually time to create some high-resolution promotional images for use in magazines, as box artwork or as exhibition posters, until finally comes the calm. And then, we begin again.

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