During GDC 2017 at the Art Direction Bootcamp, Andrew Maximov, Lead Technical Artist at Naughty Dog, gave a talk on the future of art production for video games. It was a prognosis, detailing four of the top technological advancements that are going to drastically change our approach to game development.

These changes cause a lot of fear in the artistic community. I know this as I interact with that community every day. The introduction of 3D scanning, simulation, and procedural generation is changing the way we treat game development. These new elements may remove the need for parts of the game production pipeline that have been standard practice for ages. Megascans and SpeedTree already are taking away jobs from foliage artists. Environment artists can now scan entire buildings in a day. And developers used Houdini to build an entire town in Ghost Recon: Wildlands. Technology is changing the way we live. It’s changing the way we work. And if you really want to freak out about it, read Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence. But, we’re not about to dive into deep philosophical discussions—we’ll leave that to Elon Musk.

Instead, we’ll discuss Andrew Maximov’s informative talk while adding our own commentary on the subject as well as naming a handful of companies that already are influencing the way we treat production today. In doing so, we hope to lessen a community’s fear about the future and demonstrate that there is a light at the end of the tunnel for those working within the video game industry.