I’ve spent a little more than a year building Unleash the Avatar, a third person action RPG that’s set in India.

Recently, we got covered by Asmongold, have gone viral in China (our trailer is the 6th most watched video on IGN China on Bilibili, their version of YouTube), and have got generally good coverage on our 2nd trailer that launched a few months ago on YouTube and other social platforms as well.

As a co-founder, I spend a lot of my time doing real-time game VFX, programming and hiring.

At this point, I have been on 100s of hiring calls to fill many roles, such as rigging, animation, modeling, VFX, programming etc. I feel like I have a unique perspective because I understand a little bit of everything, and some things really well.

The other reason I was motivated to make this post is because I think game development as a field is a massive walled garden. Before this, I was building a software company, and everything felt so…open.

Whereas with games, knowledge is hard to come by. Just compare the quality and number of high quality tutorials on YouTube vs programming ones, you’ll get the idea.

I think the reasons are two-fold:

• Game studios want to guard their secrets to have a competitive advantage (in software, people are usually building different things for different use cases, whereas in games, you’re competing for a finite pool of people’s time).
• The second is that it’s genuinely hard - especially because you need to be knowledgeable a lot of times about both art and tech (read: have taste and skills)

I also want to mention that the industry has been on a general down-trend due to lots of layoffs. That doesn’t change which roles are structurally scarce, but it does change how many openings exist at any given moment.

With that being said, let’s talk about the roles in game development. I’ll categorize based on several factors like demand, saturation, and how the roles may change due to improvements in technology.

The Golden Bracket

VFX Artist

In my opinion, this is one of the best roles given how in demand it is, compared to its saturation level.

I read that art universities produce 1000 concept artists for every 1 game VFX artist. That’s insane, especially considering the demand for game VFX is growing.

I personally switched over to doing VFX for the project once programming was in a good place, since we were bottlenecked.

I didn’t know at the time, but this was a really good decision. First of all, I really enjoy doing it. Second, it’s a mix of a type of programming (through shaders i.e materials in Unreal Engine), and art, which gives me a high level overview of everything we do at our studio.

It’s hard (and valuable), because many people who are good at art don’t have technical knowledge, and many who are technically capable can’t be bothered with art. You need taste and skills.

There might be some who refute this point, saying:

• many companies hire VFX artists on contract/freelance basis, and this does not provide stability,
• it’s still a high intensity role with potential burnout because of how demanding it is

While this is partially true, it still doesn’t combat the problem of how shallow the pool of VFX talent really is. Furthermore, as you get really good at it, a lot more opens up for you:

• Being good at shaders also helps with environment, characters, and the rest of your art in game,
• You can also help a ton with interaction in games, as particles can be driven through collisions, events in the world, etc (e.g: leaves that move with the character, roaches that scuttle around based on light sources),
• You can flex into cinematics, as you naturally end up becoming comfortable with Sequencer anyway,
• If you’re a small studio, you also help a ton with general game feel, as a large part of your role involves making abilities feel good.
• Broadly, VFX artists are a subset of Technical Artists, for which demand will only continue to climb.

Technical Animator

To explain why this role is important, I would like to walk you through a little bit of history.

Character animation is an important (and tedious) part of building games. For decades, a character artist would make a character, and hand it over to a Rigging and Skinning Artist (R&S), who would then prepare the model for animators. The animators would then create (or cleanup) animations to bring the character to life. In short, R&S serves as a bridge between character artists and animators.

I think that’s changing a lot. For example, Unreal Engine now heavily invests in a tool called Control Rig, which is basically like a programming toolkit to make procedural rigs.

A technical animator is someone who figures out how to do procedural animation, (eg: running physics simulations like RBANS, doing motion matching etc) through Control Rig and a host of other new features in the engine. Sometimes, the R&S artist gets involved as well.

An example, when a creature like an octopus moves, it is extremely tedious to animate 8 legs. A toolkit like Control Rig allows a technical animator (or rigging artist) to add logic such that, if the movement of the octopus is keyframed by an animator, all the legs will procedurally animate without you lifting a finger.

The things that you can cover are endless. Here are some examples:

• Chaos cloth for hero clothing,
• RBANs and Anim Dynamics for physics based movement on saddles, chains, a player’s sash, flask attached to the waist etc,
• High fidelity locomotion animations, through motion matching, foot IK, retargeting, foot placement etc (Epic Games themselves use this stuff heavily in their Game Animation Sample),
• Procedural animations for creatures.

The competitive staples

Programmer, Animator, 3d Character Artist, 3d Environment Artist, UI/UX Artist, Cinematic Artist, Sound Design

These are roles that will exist in almost every studio. They’re high in demand, and are generally competitive roles. Senior, experienced and/or exceptionally talented people are highly valued here.

• Having a handful of stellar programmers improves productivity by 50-100x. Having lots of editor tools, improving rendering and other pipelines, optimization, CI/CD etc.
• Cinematic artist is high in supply because a lot of people port over from the film/VFX industry to try their hand at games, and it generally translates well (like in our case). But a good cinematic artist can contribute parallely to level design, concepts and generally help with tying things together well. A good cinematic artist also reduces the work of animators by a lot if the shots are pre-planned well.
• 3d artists enjoy tools that are getting rapidly better. Metahuman creator/CC4 helps character artists pump out different types of characters quickly. Environment artists have a massive library in Quixel, Fab etc to quickly build things. However, you need a stellar cast here to plan out trimsheets, modular kits and other things that cut your production time.

I see these roles progressing the same way programming is going. You want to hire fewer, but exceptional folks because otherwise you’re a net negative.

Wildcards

Mocap Actor

This is an underrated role that is hard to hire for. There are plenty of actors who would like this sort of work, but there is a lot of nuance to it:

• For the basics, you need to be fit and a good actor to do mocap well. Check out some of the mocap done for God Of War, Black Myth Wukong etc. on YouTube
• Acting is higher prestige in traditional acting like movies, shows etc. I don’t know how many take game mocap acting seriously as an opportunity,
• A lot of the time, this role is outsourced to an agency to perform all the mocap, but I don’t think we have enough of those here in India.

Prop Artist

Prop artists make props for the environment.

Think small and large objects, like pots, pans, carts etc, but also pieces of modular kits (like doors of a house), which are reused across the game. They also help clean up photogrammetry assets, refine assets bought from the marketplace, etc.

I am not sure how this role will proceed in the future. There’s this undercurrent of a large number of available assets online, plus AI getting steadily better at this function.

You still need prop artists, but you needed a lot more of them before.

A large portion of the value with environments is created by Environment Artists, who are responsible for synthesis and composition of the environment with these assets.

However, a good prop artist, especially leads, are worth their weight in gold. This again involves multiple things, such as being smart about shaders (eg: Material Layers in Unreal Engine), day to day workflows, planning out kits, having a strategy for photogrammetry assets, etc.

It also involves getting good at engine specific stuff like Procedural Content Generation (PCG), to think about how lay assets out together (eg: props on a stall), having taste and judgement to figure out which assets need to be done from scratch vs photogrammetry vs marketplace etc.

At this point, perhaps you’re starting to see a pattern. The most valuable end up being the ones who are cross-functional i.e they can do multiple things within the engine and outside of it, contribute to different areas (which also bolster their own), and have refined taste.

Will hire a couple, but need exceptional

Story Writer, Game Designer, Level Designer, Concept Artist

These roles are already few in number in a studio, and you only want to hire the best. The reason I don’t put them under competitive staples is because there’s a low barrier to entry to most of them (except maybe concept art, which is also changing), and you don’t necessarily require a hard skill. It’s very taste driven.

The bar, however, keeps getting higher. I recently heard of one studio that won’t allow you to interview for a game designer role without showing them your Steam library. Expect more of these extreme things to happen.

The people who get these roles however, enjoy amazing benefits.

• Programmer productivity has increased massively, which means they can build editor tools at will for level and game designers to tinker with gameplay and level blockouts. You can be quick to prototype and throw away things,
• Story writers get access to more and more information, and AI helps them a lot with synthesis and uncovering new information. AI is very poor at writing good stories however, and will not touch this role.

I have left out voice acting and music. We will cross that chasm later as we come to it in production.