My name is Alexander Nelson
and during the spring
of 2015 I was an intern
at
Sparkypants Studios, a game developer
located
in Baltimore Maryland. I study and
occasionally
work in pre production
as my
primary focus of illustration
studies, and internships are a fun
way to learn a lot.
During the prior semester
I had taken advanced concept art with David Inscore as
a course, during winter break he reached out with an
internship offer at Sparkypants where he is an
art
director.
Sparkypants studios is a
medium sized
game developer who is
new in name, but
filled with a sizable number of industry veterans. A lot of
prior experience studios members
had in the field revolves
around real time strategy
games, and open world
role playing
gams. The Studio was
in a temporary
office in
mount Washington, but
is in the process of moving to
the
Centre Building on North Charles.
Dave Inscore was my
supervisor,
as stated he
is one of the art directors at the studio. This role
encompassed
making sure
visual themes
meshed well,
handing out assignments to artists based
on sprint period
needs,
and contributing
his own visual ideas and
pieces as well. Dave also is
just an energetic guy and
lends
great energy
on top of his art direction.
I worked alongside 2 other interns and
close friends mostly, and
we shared the same workloadesponsibilities. The work done spanned over
many different areas based on need,
early on it was a lot of concepting work
with
stress on
icon
work for user interface readability. I worked
also on creating a
minimap for in game use, and
worked on making UI borders, with
different shape and
color
treatments. We also
focused on game menu item isolation,
cleaning
of 3d stills, texture capture, decal treatments, map area ideation
and 3d exploration with
game assets. Toward
period
end the work shifted
toward
ability
treatments,
3d study
and menu concepts. I'm most proud of designing a few item appearances that made it into
the
game build and
got 3d treatments, they look
awesome.
My biggest lessons
learned have to be an even better grip
on studio communication. Ask
lots
of questions, and
make sure
they are on point,
saves a lot of pipeline hours. It's also important to
be aware of everyones work so
that what you create jives with the visual index
of the joint project. It's
also really
important to
laugh and have fun with
your coworkers, because you're all working on stuff
you love and when neat things
happen it's
ok to cheer. This
work period has not
so much clarified my
work goals so much as
re-confirmed my
love of doing this
kind of work. Every internship
has
been like that,
it's exciting
to see work click
together,
it's exciting
to do work in an industry where you get to learn every day.