Indi Tech Art vs AAA Tech Art

Professional
#1

Hello all!

Long time lurker, first-time poster you know the story.
I currently work as a tech artist for AAA company, I also currently have an enticing offer from an indie studio. My question is 2 fold. First is there any stigma or difficulty switching from being an indie tech artist to AAA (in the event things don’t work out)? Second Other than the obviously reduced resources, smaller teams, and the associated increase in the number of hats one is to wear, what are some of the differences to expect switching from AAA to indie?

#2

Oops, just giving you a heads up that this is the wrong category. This part of the forum is meant for job openings only, you might want to recreate the question on the Professional or Community category. Or join us via Slack to chat, people are more active around there! Thanks! :slight_smile:

#3

Moving this to #professional

#4

The good news:

  • Indy life teaches survival skills fast. There’s usually nobody to fall back on so you learn to swim (or sink…)
  • Indy life gives you independence You’ll have a lot more freedom to pick and choose what to work on.
  • Indy life feels meaningful It’s a lot more satisfying to see an entire system that depends on you than to be eyebrow artist #3 on a team of hundreds

The bad news:

  • Indy teams are more precarious Smaller studios can easily get sideswiped by the market or by money problems: the average lifespan of an < 25 person studio is a lot shorter than that of a 400+ behemoth.
  • Indy tech problems aren’t sexy at least, not a lot of the time. It usually takes a big team to support a Siggraph-worthy research effort.
  • Indy life is hectic The jack-of-all-trades aspect is a great way to learn and really teaches you a broad range of skills. The lack of support can mean more is riding on you as an individual so you may feel more stress.

There’s no universal answer – you’ll just have to rely on your instincts to know if it’s for you. For some it’s a grand adventure (I’ve always enjoyed my indie/startup stints) but for some it’s very stressful: some people want a ladder to climb and a 401k to fill up.

2 Likes
#5

Thank you, that’s a good breakdown and helps a lot.

#6

I can’t speak for AAA studios but I can (try to) tell how’s the life of a TA in a 10-15 people indie studio.
You’re not a real, focused on a field, TA: you’re and you’ll be for a long time a real jack of all trades, just like Steve said.
There is no “pipeline” TA, or “character TA” or whatever: there is “just” a person that is not 100% artist and not 100% programmer, and his/her job is to take care of everything that fall in this grey area.
That’s it.
One week you could work on a bunch of shaders and the next one you could rig a character. And maybe in the middle you also had to profile the game and understand why it runs at 12 fps :smile:.

Sometimes it’s very exciting because you really feel that there is a specific problem to be solved by you, and since you’re not a real specialist, problems will vary a lot: this helps to keep enthusiasm and curiosity high.
But sometimes it could be boring because,in a small studio, you will rarely face huge problems, and when there aren’t problems at all there is no huge pipeline or toolset to maintain. So you could end doing just small production tasks.
The up is that the environment will be probably very dynamic, informal and friendly.
One downside could be that you could work on uninteresting project: can’t speak for every small studio here but my experience is that “bills need to be paid”: this means that sometimes the game-of-our-dream must be put on hold and some other “b2b” not fun project must be done.
If this goes for a long period and if you can’t find the good in these projects, it could be bad for morale.
This actually was for me one of the major problems I had to cope with in years (together with money problems).
Oh, there is another pros btw: you could probably propose ideas and even “invent” your own tasks sometimes.
Maybe a small studio doesn’t have some toolset or pipeline and you, coming from a bigger and more structured company, could bring these improvements to the team: it’s something I try to do whenever I can… Learn from TAO folks and apply here!

My 2 (and a always verbose) cents :wink:

4 Likes
#7

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