Author: by Staff

What guidelines do game artists need to follow to reach success? Volition's Keith Self-Ballard chooses three, and outlines his top tips and best practices as part of a new Gamasutra feature. Self-Ballard's top tip? Managing ego. Although pride in one's work is important, an inflate sense of personal pride, he says, is massively destructive to an individual's working relationships: Personal pride is the slippery slope that can lead an artist to view their peers as less valuable and/or less talented. As such, they stop considering constructive feedback (crucial for any growing artist) from any person deemed to be of less worth. Self-Ballard says the most talented and successful artists he's known never let a sense of entitlement jeopardize their artistic growth or their relationships with their team. They took great care in their artistic craft.However, they never allowed their considerable talent to get in the way of openness to input from others, regardless of experience. When their artwork had to be altered (or cut), they accepted the changes that needed to be made -- even if they didn't always agree. Self-Ballard's full feature goes in-depth on this issue, plus recommendations for professional communication and how to respond to a wide variety of assignments (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from other websites).