Alan Mealor - The Games Industry: What it is and how to break into it.

Alan Mealor is a lead artist at Lucid Games. He started out as a Junior and worked his way up, having been in the industry for 16 years. He mainly focuses on environment art as his job. He gave a lot of facts about the game industry and it's growth over the past few years, saying that in 2016 the video game market was worth around $99.6 billion worldwide and 3.8 billion in the UK alone. He also mentioned that within the UK there are around 2000 video game companies, with 250 at studio size.

Mealor then went on to talk about what he felt was currently driving the games industry, with his first point being middleware such as Unreal 4 and Substance Painter that help cut down the length of time it takes to make things like texture sheets and also help to make them procedural, allowing more re-use and easier redesigning if needed. Another thing he considers to be having a huge effect is the pipeline of work within companies has matured, with reduced cost, larger teams and the ability to prototype game ideas faster.

Mealor also gave some information on Substance Painter; what it is and how to use it.

Finally he gave his advice on how to get a job in the industry:

• On your Portfolio, less is more.
• Take out the lower quality work, keep it looking nice.
• Play to your strengths, it's easier to switch job later than get one first.
• Tailor your submissions to the company you're applying to.
• Show more than just renders, include things like wireframes and UVs.
• Show that you can make something from the real world, not just a fantasy item. It shows a good eye for detail.
• Put time and effort into each render, don't just take a screen shot and move on.
• Use things like Art station, CG society and Polycount to get honest feedback on work and improve it.
• Try to make something different and avoid cliches.
• Knowledge of software helps but it's more important to know things like the rules of animation; things they can't teach at the company.
• Not neccesary to make your own model for animating, using your own might bring down the rest of the work if it doesn't look good enough.