ABSTRACT
Team Role Interview: Presentation Art Director Please introduce yourself, your role, and the game team(s) that you have been part of. I’m Clint Jorgenson, most recently Presentation Art Director on Skate 3. How did you get your start in the games industry? Skate 3 is my fifth game, and I have been with Electronic Arts my entire career. I got my first job on the Def Jam: Fight for New York project. I was extremely lucky. It was a great game and a seriously talented group, and I happened to have the right skills at the right time to be able to join the team. A couple of years later, with more experience under my belt, I moved over to the original Skate, which was in pre-production at the time, and I have been with the team ever since. Describe your role on Skate 3. What does “presentation” mean on your team? Presentation is a word used in a lot of different ways in the industry. In my case, it is all the non-game-world elements that glue together the game experience. User interface is the largest part of it, and that’s where most of my experience lies. I am also responsible for cinematic effects, motion graphics for videos, visual indicators, and transitions, and I am an advocate for polish and clear communication in the game in general. This book is about making great games. What is your part of the process, and how do you make sure that you’re contributing to a great game? There is something special about games that speak with one voice and are highly polished; I’m a strong believer in the importance of that. So I bring that approach to everything I work on. I have the unique position to make sure a lot of separate parts being worked on by different people come together in a unified way. Inconsistency and lack of polish keep reminding the gamer that they are using a piece of software, and that breaks immersion. What was the strangest or most unexpected part of working on the game? It is always interesting how certain visual elements that you think are going to work out so great can fall flat when they have to conform to a usable interface. For example, on Skate 3 we were heavily influenced by Modernist graphic design and print from the 1950s and 1960s. Some visual elements that looked killer in a single reference piece ended up feeling forced and unneeded, so we cut them out. On the other hand, elements born spontaneously from an unexpected UI purpose can completely take over and become a strong part of the visual look. An example of this came from our Heads-Up Display, or HUD. We used the philosophy that our HUD needed to be as lightweight and clear as possible, so we always started with text, only adding art as needed. As a result, some of the framing solutions found their way back into the UI and improved the entire package. Our Skate 3 style guide, kind of like a style bible we use to make sure certain style guidelines are followed across the game, looked really different at the end of pre-production compared to our final results. It has the same feel, but we made a lot of improvements to the details that weren’t planned. Did you feel like you were able to contribute specific ideas to Skate 3 ? Yes, definitely. Our team has a culture where everyone’s ideas are given respect and have a chance of realization. The idea of the singular genius and an army of workers grinding out his vision based on the perfect design document is a myth; everyone has to feel ownership and be involved. Was there anything specific to Skate 3 presentation efforts that you felt went particularly well? We have an approach to pre-production that brings everyone into the process of deciding on the presentation concept. Knowing from the past what poison uncertainty can be, this is invaluable. Hitting that stride of knowing what you are setting out to accomplish is a huge moment. For me, at the very beginning, staring at a blank slate can be terrifying!
