The Art Education team at Riot Games recently launched a 10-part educational video series all about video game art and the different artists who work on a game! It's called So You Wanna Make Games?? and it's available on Youtube and on a Riot Games microsite that also has some additional resources.

What are these videos?

At its core, So You Wanna Make Games?? is an attempt at demystifying the art pipeline for game development. In this 10-part series, we discuss many of the sub-disciplines that make up a game team’s art pipeline, boil down the high level philosophies behind each of these sub-disciplines, and share some words of advice from artists in the field.

The target audience for the series is young creatives - think high school to early college-aged kids - who like art and games, but wouldn’t otherwise know about all the different creative paths that exist in games.

Where these videos came from

In 2017, the Art Education team at Riot created a roster of cross-discipline internal workshops for artists at the studio, with the goal of targeting and addressing knowledge and expertise gaps across the art department. We ran the workshops through the beginning of 2018, and artists who participated agreed that having a broader understanding of the art pipeline helped reinforce their developer mindset and appreciate the impact of their own work.

We wanted to capture the knowledge collected for these workshops and make it accessible to current and future developers, so we decided to convert the workshop content into this video series. We hope it helps demystify our often intimidating discipline and industry, and serves as an educational springboard for creatives who are just starting out.

What can you do?

A primary goal of this initiative is to increase awareness and understanding of the different creative paths that exist within games. We hope that by demystifying and humanizing these roles, we can broaden the access point for creatives everywhere who might not otherwise consider a career in games. So please help us broaden the reach of this industry knowledge by sharing these videos with members of your community! 

Feel free to reach out with any questions about the development of this series!