Rhys Shepherd –

Student to tech artist:

He is a technical artist at Epic Games. 

He wanted to first talk about how to get into the industry. And then about being a technical artist.

Graduated in 2018, final year project was Hacker Ball! After uni he carried on with this project and released it as a final game as this can be used in your portfolio and help explain design choices in all aspects of the game such as art choice, coding choice etc. It also helped hone his skill.

First job was a QA tester for globalstep, mainly testing gambling games, but this helped give him some experience in the industry, and helped him get used to jira. He mentioned that QA testing is a great step into the industry. 

Out of uni he managed to land a role in 22 Cans and was a junior programmer and worked on games like Legacy. He explained that he contacted the CEO of TwoPoint Studio and got directed to another company and was able to land his job that way. He noted all of the skills he was able to hone and develop. However, he only lasted 3 months due to not being amazing at that role. He did add though, that the experience even on the CV was useful and important.

After searching in the job market, he was able to land a role as an artist & design at Erase all kittens. It was a very small team of 3 people, and gave more indie experience and originally applied for a senior javascript developer role. However, due to the company lack of funding they had to let him go. 

After this he then started to go back and took some courses on C#. 

Going back into the industry he applied for Mediactonic and was able to get a role of Junior Tech Artist. Then highlighted all the skills he gained being there and what he actually did. Such as working with 300+ people and working with more software and across different teams. And dealing with imposter syndrome. And unfortunately, he had his first cancelled game which is dis-heartening. But stressed that juniors aren’t expected to know everything and its best to communicate when you’re struggling. 

Progressing, he got brought to Epic Games due to his company being bought out. But this meant he transitioned to being a Tech Artist and was working on Fall Guys. This showed progression from junior to mid level, and gave him his first taste of working on a live service AAA game and this helped develop his love for Tooling. This also meant he had to focus on cross platform development. 

As of now he has transitioned to being a tech artist in epic games working on Fortnite, and had to learn a completely new engine professionally working with a massive AAA game.

Some of the notable softwares he has used are:

• Slack
• Jira
• Perforce
• GitHub
• Visual Studio
• VS Code
• Unity
• Unreal
• Photoshop
• Mya
• Houdini 
• Substance painter / Design 

Moving onto interviews – 

He mentioned some of the questions he got asked:

• What’s the most important aspect of designing a game 
• Give me an example of a hard problem you had to solve and how you overcame it
• How would you do this differently 
• If you get stuck on a task, what’s the next step you would take?
• Technical tasks: Finish the code, create some UI, fix this bug etc

Moving onto the second part of the presentation:

Looking at what is Tech Art:

There a spectrum – art –––– Tech

Ranging from 2D tech artist to UI tech artist to Shader programmer

His advice was, finding a favourite aspect and becoming a specialist whilst also making sure to have played around with all other aspects. Each day is a different challenge. Making sure to keep up with new software and continue to learn. Whilst also working on personal projects. 

Q.

When applying for senior positions / positions that were out of your experience and skill range. How did it go? what were the reactions / how did it transition to other roles.

A.

The whole point was applying for everywhere, the whole point was getting to get the work in front of them. He was just applying for anything, and was just hoping something would stick. He said obviously the bigger the company, the less chance, but if you find a smaller studio that has links to your style of work, just apply. Worst case is just being ignored or a no, best case you get experience in an interview. The key is to just apply for everything, most of the no’s aren’t personal and are more just the fact you’re not fit for the role.