Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

How long anything takes in video games is incredibly subjective. We're not telling any tales out of school there. Not only does the complexity of the item itself factor in, but the relative importance of it. If it's what we call a hero asset versus just something that's going to be seen in the background, that'll mean the fidelity has to be higher. It means there are probably more review gates involved. The point at which you say, yeah, that's it, is probably easier to get to on a background item than it is on a big hero asset. This applies to anything from characters to props to flora and fauna and spaceships and everything like that. We used to talk to Paul Jones about this quite a bit, about how long this process took. And it's always a question of how soon you zero in on the idea. Because I always like to say this is game development, not game construction. You don't always just know what the thing you're making is when you start. A lot of it is about exploring a process and looking for a feeling. And as David can attest, David's my producer, even when making videos, I will sometimes be very, very prescriptive. I want this and do it like this and put this here and put this there and then let me see it like this. And then the editors will go out and they'll do it and come back, and I go, oh, that's terrible, don't do any of that, do something new. Even after doing this for almost a decade, I don't know if it's going to work until I see it. And that applies to just about anything, especially during the concept phase. It's one of the reasons the concept phase exists, because the idea is that you've answered most of those questions during the concept phase. But as is often the case, you discover things when you get to 3D art. You discover that, oh, we didn't look at the back, or the metric for this was wrong, and stuff like that. We're looking at the concept on the screen right now.

Lewis Thompson · Senior Props Artist

Yeah, I don't know how the hinge works. That's something that hasn't been answered for me, so that's something I'd have to think about a bit more. Working from a concept is really nice because it becomes more about problem solving to create forms as opposed to problem solving to create functionality and the entire object. You've got a starting point, which is really, really cool. You can see these are latches. There's a handle that you can carry it with. It's got branding on it. You can tell it's a medical crate from the branding, maybe the colours, obviously the text. Whereas if I came on this livestream and I didn't have a concept, I probably would spend most of the hour just spinning.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Concept's great for a lot of reasons, but I think chief amongst them all is somebody else goes through a certain amount of hell instead of you. Even when Alberto was doing his two weeks ago, two of them had very striking silhouettes. One of them was pretty much kind of what you expected. And one of them was a disgusting homunculus that he should still feel shame about. And he knows which one that was.

Lewis Thompson · Senior Props Artist

I watched it and I was very jealous how fast he works. He's an absolute machine.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

But see, regardless of how fast he is, a concept artist is still attempting to hit something that's in the mind of multiple art directors. Whether it's Elwyn in Austin, or it's Ben Curtis here, or it's our new person in Montreal whose name is escaping me right now, or CR, or John Crew, or maybe Ian's got a real strong opinion on this one because it plays into a gameplay that he's... So you're trying to synthesize all these ideas. Even as fast as you can be or as fast as he can be, it always comes down to how soon you get to that consensus, that you realize that thing that somebody has in their head, or sometimes help them realize that thing in their head was wrong, and go, oh, I thought that would look much better.