From an art perspective, my tasks are mainly blocking out areas, doing a first lighting/particle pass, creating materials and textures or level art beautification like placing props and decals. Thinking about things like “environmental story telling”, giving the spaces you work on meaning. Finding good shapes, silhouettes, colors and creating a good and interesting mood for your environment. Normally you’ll get a block-out from a level designer and depending on how big your concept art department is, you’ll be provided with concepts and paint-overs. You then start detailing the area based on those approved concepts and try to stick to them as close as possible, while of course trying to improve on them as best as possible.

Often you have managing tasks like requesting assets from prop artists, doing quick overpaints or requesting them from a concept artist, talk about mood and colors with the lighting artist, communicate with designers to make sure nothing blocks gameplay, schedule tasks with your producer, make sure deadlines like alpha, beta, and content lock can get done on time and so on. It’s not only about getting all the art in and making things look beautiful. Later on when finishing a level you normally have to analyze problem areas for performance. So you need to have a good understanding of the engine and the tech of your game in general. A lot of things can have an impact on performance. The triangle count of an environment, too many expansive props, particles, dynamic lights or decals are the type of things you have to find and work out with different departments. And of course fixing bugs is another main task. Stretched UVWs, gaps in meshes, collision problems, all these issues need to get fixed before a level can be finished.