Cory Bamford · Lead Prop Artist

Generally, the concept artists will have a pretty decent understanding of how the weapon operates. They will be coordinating with designers and stuff for the pre-production process. Like, how do we want this weapon to behave? What kind of features does it have? All of that stuff gets kept in mind when a weapon's in the pre-production stage. So when we receive an asset, the challenges we face largely are: okay, we have this idea for a weapon. It does X, Y and Z. It has these functions. How do we make that work with the in-game systems? How does it work with the character rig? How does it look scale and proportion-wise and so on? A lot of the legwork is done not necessarily by the concept artists themselves, but in the pre-production stage there's a lot of discussion about the functionality of a weapon. And then we're like, okay, how do we realize this dream of the concept artists and design and so on? Obviously, we're just one small facet of the weapons pipeline. With weapons, you have audio, VFX, animations, the actual gameplay systems in terms of weapon damage and balance and stuff. We just make the thing itself. We have a lot of talented people with many, many different skill sets who also contribute to weapons as a feature. We're a part of weapons content, but the weapons feature contains a lot more developers. So we're downstream, so to speak, of some departments. But there are also people who depend on our work, like animators, audio and VFX; they need to see the asset in-game first. It's a multi-disciplinary sort of thing.