Alright my fellow Game Art and Design students, it’s time yet again for another Gamer Report Interview. This time I am interviewing a great friend of mine I had the privilege of meeting during my time in Vancouver. His name is Joe Crawford and he runs Celestine Studios. He also teaches many students up in Vancouver as well as many developers already in the industry. Going studio to studio to help keep everyone’s skills up to date.
Have you ever had a friend where, no matter what question you asked him, he always came back with a thorough, and logical response? That’s Joe. I can ask him just about anything and feel enlightened by his answers. Lucky for me, I’ve kept in contact with him since I left my favorite home away from home and he is still there for me and many of his former students. He is a dedicated soul and the amount of knowledge you can gain for him is just immense. Which is why I wanted to interview him and talk about some things on my mind lately. Hope you enjoy!
First off I’d like to establish who you are and what your background is in the game industry.
I actually have relatively little background in the games industry itself. The first professional studio project I worked on was at Mainframe Entertainment, for the ReBoot video game. The parts that I did were pre-rendered cut scenes, not for actual game play. I’ve taught hundreds of students over the years, and many studios around the world currently employ students of mine. (EA, Ubisoft, Radical Entertainment, Sony, and far more than I would really want to list here.) I still do support for many students who are now professionals, and I keep in touch with many of my students from long ago. Its always fun to see what they are up to now.
As a technical artist, I have worked with a lot of people in the industry, and have provided assistance (generally through short term contracts) to game studios and game artists. When Backbone Entertainment/Digital Eclipse was in Vancouver I used to do that for them on a semi regular basis.
Primarily at this point, my interest in games is as an independent developer. The game industry is seeing a surge in independently produced great games recently, such as World of Goo, Crayon Physics Deluxe, and Braid. All of these games were very cheap to create compared to the titles that most publishers release, and they are all far far better than the average game. It proves that making great games doesn’t require huge teams or tons of money. My goal is to go in that direction with my own studio. I currently have a project in development, and have been surprised at how easy it is to get your game up and running these days. Some of the open source tools for it are really great. World of Goo for example used ODE for their in game physics. ODE is a great free open source physics simulator, and I’m using it for my own projects as well.
I went to school at Robert Batemen Secondary School. I didn’t do any other post secondary because the classes I got at Batemen were really great. There’s really nothing special about the school, but the teacher that I had there, Bill Henderson, was amazing. He actually won the Prime Minister’s Award for his teaching work.
Since I’m very much an owner/operator, I have to have a lot of skills myself. I need to be good at communicating with clients, and managing projects, but I also have to set up the infrastructure and everything so that the people I work with can get their jobs done easily.
How long have you been teaching/mentoring/lecturing and what inspired you to take this as a career path?
I’ve always like teaching, and doing it professionally was something I just sort of fell into by luck. I got a lot of very positive response from students and once I realized how much of an impact I was having improving students lives, I decided it would be something I’d continue all my life.
I’ve taught classes at several different post secondary institutions, as well as some seminars, such as the “Digifest” events that happened a few years ago. I’ve always really enjoyed it. As a result, I’m planning some independent public seminars in the near future.
The game industry is most certainly not recession proof. I’ve seen a huge number of layoffs recently. Many friends of mine, including several long term veteran guys at established studios have had to deal with lay offs etc.
I think that even when a companies revenues aren’t drastically affected, the market as a whole does affect the actions of a company. Lay offs frequently happen just so companies can please the shareholders, and make it looks like they are cutting costs in troubled times. I know of one particular job cut where upper management at a company let go of someone very important, and the game suffered tremendously because of it. That most likely will cause the game to do poorly, lowering revenue by a lot more than that ones guy’s salary.
Decide clearly on what you want to do. If you are interested in being an artist, what kind of artist? Do you want to be a 3d character modeler? A concept artist? A world/environment modeler? A rigger? If you work at a large company you will probably have to specialize quite a bit.
Do you want to do creative design work, and have an impact on how the game plays, and not just how it looks? If so, that’s a much more difficult goal, but you should be clear with yourself from the beginning.
If you want to do design work, (in my view, that’s the fun part) a great way to start is by making mods to existing games. Way back in 1995 we used to hack around with Doom and Doom II, and I learned a lot by doing that. The engines have improved over the years, with Quake, Unreal, Doom 3, and now the Unreal 3 engine. For someone learning, I would recommend that they get started with a game that’s easy to mod, and then get experience building levels and scripting interaction etc.
Where do you see the game industry heading? Will we still be seeing multi-million dollar games being developed or will we see a more aggressive trend of smaller indie games?
My guess is that big multi-million dollar games will always be made, but that more and more smaller games will find success. There is a lot of growth in the casual games market, and a lot of growth in online distribution of games. It’s similar to the film and television industry. Blockbuster movies are still being made all the time, but because of online distribution and marketing, a larger audience is now exposed to independent films. Smaller movies and television shows are able to find an audience, without having huge marketing budgets. I think it’s the same with pretty much every kind of media. News, books, music, movies, video games, and anything else. As long as we have a reasonable amount of network neutrality and access, small developers with good products will always be able to reach their audience.
Many artists have been laid off including friends of yours. What can they do to get back on their feet and get hired at another studio? Also, now that there is an even more competitive crowd out searching for game art positions, how does a game art student stand out from the crowd of experienced artists?
Its a bad time for a lot of people. However, I think the most important thing is always the same: Keep learning. If an artist has some downtime, use it to take the time to learn things you didn’t get exposed to in your working environment. Its a fast paced industry, with new workflows being developed all the time. If an artist isn’t working they can take that time to develop new skills, and continue to work on their portfolio and demo reel.
Another possibility would be to join one of the many volunteer based modding or game development projects. It can be a good way to get your name attached to something, and the content created for it can be good portfolio material as well. It can be similar to what many programmers do working on open source projects in their spare time.
The most important thing is to keep working, and keep growing. Although I had some excellent experiences working with companies early in my life, I’ve learned far more in more recent years just by working very actively to teach myself as much as possible. With the internet and all the resources available these days, you can teach yourself pretty much anything.
Be sure to check out Celestine Studios and VanArts to learn more…
The Gamer Report 