Introduction

Well, I have been lucky in my career because I’ve been able to work at three studios so far, and each of those have provided a lot of lessons for me. My first studio was a startup called Perpetual Entertainment in San Francisco, where I spent most of my time doing cleanup of outsourcing work. It might sound strange, but I really loved that job because I was just so happy to be working on games and to be part of a team I enjoyed working with. I learned that you often don’t get the awesome art assignments right out of school, and that you have to build your team’s trust in you before you get those chances.

The second studio I worked at was Bungie, where I worked on Halo 3. This is where I really got a chance to learn from incredible artists. I was so intimidated by them, and intimidated by the Bungie name and the Halo franchise. I mean, this was my dream of dreams – to get a chance to work for Bungie and work on Halo? It was crazy to me! The assignment that really changed things for my confidence was when I was given the cinematic Halo ring to finish. Here was a chance to do something really cool and just kind of go crazy with details and stuff, where I had a huge amount of creative freedom – when I completed that, that’s the moment in my mind when I became a real game artist.