The videogame industry is wild. A market that is flooded with young talent, employees that are unpaid and laid off, upcoming trends that are entirely unpredictable. But this article isn’t about that. This article is about what I thought it’s like to work in a studio versus what it really is. Most of the time, the proceedings inside a studio are more cautiously wrapped in mystery than Area 51. I got to see the inside of a German videogame company during a six month conceptart internship. Here are some of the things I’ve learned.

1. Forget about playing games all day

Developing videogames surely involves a good part of testing your productions and playing games, “for inspiration”, right? Well, yes and no. It’s true that fixing bugs, translating games or porting titles for consoles requires a lot of back-and-forth from the Programmers between prototype and editor. But in the Art department, there’s not much else going on than Painting- and 3D Software. Sure all those gamepads on the desks aren’t for decoration. But it’s the graphic tablets that really look worn from use. In the end, making games takes a lot of time. Some of my co-workers didn’t even have a Steam account.

2. Say hello to your new family

The first thing you might notice upon arrival at a videogame studio is that there are real people sitting behind rows of screens. People who do the same things like you the whole day and who are mostly interested in the same things that you are crazy about. And that’s quite a change for most of us with a background of the cavemanesque lifestyle. Often times as a Freelancer, I’ve been working on art without speaking a word the whole day, and I know I’m not alone with that. The above all most striking advantage of any studio environment therefore is the social aspect. Making games is more than a job. Work and hobby becomes one. A videogame studio is basically a living community of nerds. Where the people you work with grew up with the same idols and stories like you. Where if you crack a joke, most will actually understand it. And when you have a bad day, you’ll be pulled through. It feels great to realize that if you woke up dead tomorrow, there are people who would notice your absence. It feels great to be home.

3. Learn to live with NDA

I might stand alone with this opinion, but non-disclosure agreement isn’t that painful after all. In fact, it does have its upsides. It lets you focus more on the work you’re making. NDAs are supposed to prevent the leaking of unreleased titles’ material to the public for competition and license reasons. Even though in the age of socialmedia and crowdfunding I see it as highly adversal for developers not to post and share as much insight and information as possible, for the artists behind the IPs, it could actually turn out to be a good idea to take a step back from the public conversation. There is a point when to promote your work and get feedback, but all too often, we’re too hungry for early approval and the Share button is just a click away. Feedback comes from the Art director anyway, who is more fond of telling the harsh truth than your Facebook friends. Working at a studio makes you more patient, more resilient and more objective about your own work. It changes the way you think about your process of producing.

4. Do good work, and do it fast

Remember the novice days when you could doodle away until you just didn’t see anything else to add? Those surely were instructive. But polishing work becomes a luxury when working in-house. There is a saying that goes “done is better than perfect”. After all, you are linked into a production chain. If you linger, that can slow down the whole team. It’s not the job of conceptart to look beautiful. Adapt a workflow that renders results quickly and ideally turns out plenty of variations. Hello there, photocollage and 100% mixer brush. Hello there, procedural creation techniques. Art directors are famous for hovering. And one thing you don’t want to hear is “I see no difference to three hours ago.”

“If I’d done it for the money I’d have been a fucking lawyer.” — Macklemore

5. Share the load

Nobody starts making games and expects to become rich. When choosing the career path of a game developer, it is clear that we’ll be making sacrifices in our personal lifes to follow our passion. We love the work we do. But sometimes, all those freelancing chores eat up the work time. The part that is most of a hassle perhaps is promoting yourself out there and writing invoices. It’s really nice when you have your work brought to your desk. As an artist in the studio, you will rarely have to deal with clients yourself. The executives discuss further strategies while you can focus on making pixels look beautiful. No need to code or to be marketing-savvy, others take care of that. And if something goes wrong, it’s probably a programmer’s fault. Giving up responsibility has its ups and downs, but the division of tasks is generally a good idea. At the end of the day, I’m just in awe of how the many cogs get the big wheel in motion. To become a master, you need to focus on your strengths. Watching specialists at work is amazing. The variety of tasks is large enough to see something new every day. All that organization brings another advantage: Clocking out in the evenings and on the weekends.

6. You could have it more stressful

If you really enjoy responsibility and discussions, being a Producer might be for you. Theoretically, the producer doesn’t produce anything, yet he has the largest to-do and to-reply list. I’d go so far to say our producer was the company’s inofficial boss. Having to be everywhere at the same time and to know about everything and everyone sounds fun? Overseeing the creative and technical production means you are telling people what to do, and making sure it gets done within schedule and budget. And before it gets boring, when everyone else leaves the building, have fun with contracts, pitches, publisher deals, leave requests.

7. Being Art director is best

Have a taste and be present. Being the visionkeeper is rather laid-back.

“Ideas are cheap. Ideas are easy. Ideas are common. Everybody has ideas. Ideas are highly, highly overvalued. Execution is all that matters.” — Casey Neistat

8. Programmers are very specialized people

I have a more or less concrete idea of what the rest of the team does. The Art Department defines how the game should look like. The 3D guys build props that the Level Designers stick together. And the marketers post it on Tumblr. It’s easy to imagine what Community Managers, Animators, Technical Artists, Sound Engineers do. The Programmers, however, are another thing. All they look at all day are lines of code. No images, just text. Most of the programs they work with I have never heard of before. And when two programmers are talking to each other, it’s like a foreign language. In the company, they were even having their separate office wing. Programmers are like invisible glue that hold the whole structure together. If they do their work right, you won’t notice them.

9. Bugfixing never ends

In the old days, games were released on the retail market after they had been fully finished and tested. Then came the digital distribution and the ability to discover and fix bugs post-release. Today it seems standard to put out a prototype or even an idea and cash in beforehand. Indies love Kickstarter and Steam Early Access because it takes out much of the guesswork. Being able to throw your product out on the market before selling it is a huge advantage. Player feedback shows what’s worth investing development time in and what needs adjustment. With all the trends going in the direction of the customer as the alphatester, the game companies have an easier life because they only need to produce and deliver, right? Well, not really. You just increased the size of your focus group by a multitude and it’s impossible to follow everyone’s suggestions. I used to think that the large amount of time in the programming of a videogame is spent on writing code, while in fact a first playable techdemo is a matter of weeks at most. I was surprised when I learned that the real time sink is polishing, tweaking, bugfixing. The larger the project grows, the more complex the debugging. It took our programmers 70–80% of the time by their own estimation to push a driving software that had to follow strict traffic rules from beta to stable. And that was only the classic publisher model. Now think of your hordes of alphatest reports on Steam Early Access. And the difficulty of pushing the development over the finish line is not a problem to the programmers alone. When it comes to visuals, just replace the question “Does it work?” with “Does it look pretty?” and suddenly, everyone has an opinion.

“Being a developer is like playing Tetris: Your accomplishments disappear and all of your mistakes build up until you fix them.” — Evan Tedesco

10. Unleash creativity

If you can think it, you can do it. And if you can communicate your ideas to investors and the rest of the team, that’s a plus. There aren’t many jobs that give as much freedom to the ideas of an individual as the game business. You’re inventing virtual worlds after all. The budget somewhat limits the production time and the willingness to take risks is another boundary to overcome, but otherwise the tools are there to create anything. Hardware technology has given developers the power to render things that don’t exist in real life and there is no idea that would be too wild to make a videogame out of. The market is eager to give voice to fresh concepts. Players and award juries are still digging the big popular IPs, but they also reward new approaches by student teams. There is always some kind of bandwagon going on (currently it’s zombie sandbox survival) which happens when innovative indie startups get ripped off by big dollar companies, often times without that spark of passion. True fascination for the medium shows. A game that isn’t made perfectly can still be loved if there’s heartblood put into its development. DayZ was horribly buggy, to the extent that lags and the weaknesses in the controls hindered the fun. But it also gave a generation of players a kind of gameplay never experienced before. In the end, they sold over a million copies in a month. Setting trends means being quick about releasing a new functionality or subject. The reason why the headlines are full of successful indie titles, apart from their quantity, is because they are super quick and flexible. If you want to be the first to collect the playerbase, you’d better have short decision-making channels.

11. Parlez-vous français?

Despite the huge competition and the growing sales numbers, the videogame industry is still more of a niche market than we who are moving inside it everyday would believe. How many, if any, of your former schoolmates are making games for a living today? The German developer scene is in fact very close-meshed and familiar. Inside the circle, everyone seems to know everyone. Overall, there isn’t much game development going on in Germany compared to the US or Asia. We have the Gamescom in Cologne as the world’s biggest videogame trade fair, but the numbers are still 2,000 studios in Korea versus 60 or so in Germany. Only very few German developers are internationally known. This reflects in the education system for gamedesign. Until a couple of years ago, this was no study path you would find at public schools. Now German establishments are recognizing that game development exists, but it’s a little late. Big part of gamedesign talent is recruited from abroad because German aspirants either aren’t educated properly or haven’t graduated from the new schools yet. I was actually the only local guy at the studio. Languages spoken were English, French, German, Russian, Dutch. In that order.

12. Take health seriously

Money can’t buy time. Therefore time is the most precious thing there is. And the best way to a long and productive life is to stay healthy. Now sitting at a screen the whole day, then going home to do the same isn’t exactly healthy. Having a dayjob shouldn’t be an excuse to not exercise, but I found it challenging sticking to running twice a week while working in the studio full-time. I quickly noticed that sitting in the office and eating two warm meals a day don’t go well together and had to cut down on calory intake. Balancing work and life is definitely a lesson I had to learn from the beginning. In my first week, I was so excited I forgot to eat and take breaks. I also stayed longer and took the tablet home on the weekend to work some more. You can keep doing that for a while, but in the second week I started feeling really sick and dizzy which was basically my body telling me I had been more stupid than badass. I was going to run a marathon, not a sprint, so I started paying attention to take breaks. Also, picking up a hobby away from the screen helped to stay sane and draw inspiration from other things than games. Like, reading books again. A Song of Ice and Fire is a nice read.

Let’s not get started on tendonitis, just one thing:
Move your shoulder, not your wrist.

13. Make friends

We aren’t known for being particularly extroverted, yet making a videogame happen is a very collaborative effort. I’m fascinated by the synergy of this multitude of artistic and technical disciplines. People who are geniuses at different skillsets together create something that didn’t exist before. The success of teamwork all depends on the quality of communication and trust. The market is cruel enough, why not have a little fun and be nice to each other. Getting through all the ups and downs during a studio’s history binds together. The familiarity among the studio staff was so perceptible. The most valuable inside information about industry movements I always got from people during lunch breaks. It really is all about the people. Studio names come and go. Your degree and portfolio are all nice and well, but at the end of the day the person who is most pleasant to work with is getting hired again.

14. Don’t feel too comfortable

Congrats on having won a spot in a very popular industry branch. Digital media is hip. And competition never sleeps. Game studios receive and refuse applications every week. Applicants’ skills might be good enough and relevant to the current project, but they just can’t hire more people than they have workplaces, or they must move into outsourcing freelancers. Game studios rarely give out fixed contracts, so you’d better stay on top of trends and keep yourself valuable. Especially in 3D, where new tools raise the bar all the time, it can be daunting to keep the workflow up to date. The complexity the creation process of texture maps has reached in 2015 is scientific. Computer graphics and technology will always improve, become more realistic. And one thing you want to avoid as an employee is stagnation. Students and the unemployed competition have a time bonus while you are bound into production, limited in your freedom to experiment with new techniques or testing new programs. In the worst case, you’ll be grinding away weeks without skill gain and be replaced at the end of the project. It is therefore highly recommended to keep an ear open for new software trends and include the game magazines, forums, platforms in your daily lecture. Another thing is your passion. Don’t get burned out. It’s a good idea to have a physical sketchbook to keep inspiration flowing, at least for the weekends. I also found meeting up with old friends who are not in the game business to be helpful at unclouding headspace.

15. Go against the flow

Working for one of the biggest studios in the world is the dream of many. Only the elite of artists will get to lead the visual direction of AAA projects. And working in California gives security and fame. Right? It isn’t all black and white. That company size comes with a lot of inflexibility and hesitation. The biggest of developers are famous for milking their popular IPs, or keep doing what the company veterans want, and the voice of the newcomer doesn’t get heard. Let’s put it in perspective. The numbers of staff working under the head developers go into the hundreds or thousands. It surely looks good in your resume working for that AAA studio, but the CEO or Senior Art Director probably doesn’t even personally know every single employee who works for them. It’s common for bigger productions to grow and shrink massively and get rid of loads of employees as projects are finished, whereas indies are usually a small efficient team of people who know each other for a long time. At the same time, independent developers are known for taking risks and trying out new stuff. It’s actually more difficult to get a spot at a smaller studio because those have less financial ressources and room to hire and look after people.

16. Hustle

We heard it, the indie studios don’t have the big staff numbers. They don’t have specialists and assistants for everything, so people must wear different hats and be flexible and proactive. Improvisation is part of everyday’s problem solving. Typically, these studios of young people spring up like mushrooms. Get rich or die trying. It’s a great lesson for life.

The take-away of this article should be that I recommend any young creatives curious about working at a videogame studio to try and get their own first-hand impression through something like an internship. Size of the studio doesn’t matter much. Working there can be a great entry into the industry, getting to know people and production flows. But in the long run, also ask yourself if you want to sell your time, energy and creative potential to the ideas of someone else. There are many ways to make things happen today.

My path into making videogames

Be it literature, movies, games or other forms of narration, getting fully immersed in a fictional story is a fundamental experience. Writers and Directors are making sure their characters and environments look and feel alive so we can envision ourselves saving the world from evil mutant lizards or flying through hyperspace. I always loved that. While the outside world is limited by rules and borders, the reality in my head is limitless.

I always wanted to tell stories and draw stuff

Until after grade school, I was known as the guy who drew comics. It wasn’t until the 2000s that I decided I wanted to be a game developer. The RPG Maker was the first tool that let me paint imaginary worlds and bring them to life, later I discovered I could also tell my stories in self-built Point&Click adventures. Almost a decade of self-teaching making videogames and over-ambitious student projects later, in 2014, age 24, I finally put together a portfolio to land a position as a Conceptart Intern at a real videogame studio.

It was the best thing I ever did

It’s been such an insightful and exciting half year working in-house, getting to know the people behind the games and experiencing the development processes from early concepts to marketing and shipping. Seeing first-hand how the team and production pipeline works gave me a better understanding of the industry than the ten years before.

The work atmosphere at my employer was really friendly and relaxed and everyone contributed to make me feel well included. Also giving a delusional rookie like me who didn’t even study gamedesign a chance is a big risk they took. Thanks guys.

I heard it takes ten thousand hours to mastery. One thousand down.

Update (March 27, 2015)

An interesting article was published last week about exploitive industry standards.