Faces of the industry: art-lead Jungle Heat

Next up is a new category: faces of the industry. In it, we do not so much talk to the teams, as we ask the specialists to tell us a little about themselves and about the specifics of their work. The first article is dedicated to Artem Myasnikov, art director of the St. Petersburg office Mail.ru Group.

I started with the development of browser-based MMO Faor. Prior to that, I had zero experience in games, since I came to the gaming industry from the animation film studio “Melnitsa”, where I worked consistently as an animator, layout artist and character development artist.

The most important difficulty was terminology. The people around me seemed to be speaking Russian, but I didn’t understand a word. What is a “skill” and what kind of unknown stuff is “PvP”? I studied along the way.

His style was formed by itself. Animation, Dofus, Disney cartoons, anime, but the main vector was, of course, comics: Marvel, Image, DC (especially Hellboy Mignolet).

Deliberately comic hand-drawn style is a rarity in games today. The thing is that comics are originally a geeky direction, a niche one. And the games are supposed to “hoe” a wide audience.

Working on comics is very different from working on games. There’s a script in the comics. There is a well-developed visual style. Although it is quite flexible, it implies experiments. While working on comics, there are not many tasks that need to be solved. If you are not drawing your own comic book, but, like me for Bubble, someone else’s series, then someone else has already taken over all the difficult issues. You are left with the simplest thing for you: follow the script and try to fit into a certain number of pages. You draw the heroine’s ass a little more sexy. That’s basically it.

There is another aspect. Comics suggest a more creative approach. You are already initially drawing for a flexible audience that is good about experiments. As I said, comics are for geeks. And geeks appreciate a variety of styles.

Games are more difficult. Here you are going to the subway. A ten-year-old schoolboy, a housewife, a factory worker, a centenarian, a saleswoman and a student are in the same carriage with you. It sounds like the beginning of an unfunny joke, but the point of the games is that you have to try to please this whole audience. At the same time, of course, you can’t like everyone right away. This is what game development is all about: you try to imagine your audience, to understand what visual style they might like. Housewives will not draw a harsh military strategy in khaki colors. It is customary to offer casual graphics to such an audience. These are all stereotypes, but you still have to start from them.

I start working when we have previously more or less decided on the target audience and the direction of the project. Visual search begins with a character. You try different styles: more realistic, then more cartoon. Here my department works closely with the project team, shows her sketches, feedback is expressed on them. We start from this. We change something, we leave something. A live process.

P.S. Do you have something to tell about your work, share solutions and cases? Write to us at alexander.semenov@nevosoft.ru .