Although Riot Games has faced a lot of controversy throughout last year, it hasn’t stopped the developer from supporting growth in the industry where possible. Its latest ‘So You Wanna Make Games' series of videos gives an insight into being an artist in the business, hoping to provide a clear overview of the different fields available.

The videos are far from comprehensive, acting more as a gateway to entice people to learn more about specialised areas such as Visual Effects (VFX) to User Interface (UI) to character models and animation. Each artist is responsible for something different, but combined give a visual and audible representation of the game for the player to interact with.

Episodes 1 through 10 were made available at the end of last year, tackling what game art is, Concept, Character, Environment & Tech Art, Character Animation, Game VFX and finally Sound, UI & overall Game Design. Each video lasts around 12-15 minutes, detailing each process over a course of two hours.

Riot Games offers addition resources on the website of its tenth video, from literary works such as The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell discussing different ways to analyze games; podcasts including Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work and more videos from Mark Brown and Matt Colville. You can take a look here.

KitGuru Says: This insight is undoubtedly valuable to budding video game artists, but I’ve personally found it useful in my writing. A better understanding helps to form an opinion on the development of games, valuing the final product and hopefully reporting on them with even more clarity moving forward. Thanks, Riot!

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