umn, yes ... so do i ;)

but there are ways much more hobby programmers around than hobby artists like me . take a look into the job listings : so much people are searching for aritsts ...

that was the reason why i once started my page with all my free graphics ...

And to prevent your further questions: nope, no sparetime left for requests . but the current stuff is completely free :P

I think maybe it takes longer to become a programmer good enough to make games than it does to become an artist good enough to make games, what do you all think?

I've had a hard time finding artists, and appearantly there are highly prized relationships there. It's not like you run into the temperamental artist thing or something, but more like is the work they want to do the kind that will work for the types of games produced?

I've been working at pixel art, seemingly hightly prized, and after chipping away at the skill for almost three years now, have really only produced a couple of small things that I am happy with. Maybe this is just the writer-trying-to-be-an-artist thing too, but we'll see, art is relaxing.

I've also worked with interns in multimedia during the South of Market days in the dot com boom, and their work was highly software driven in animation, and the prep or final art, or just one great image or two was in the porfolio, of the 2-D fine line black and white line art that is the establishin image for the look of the finished composition(s).

I tell artists and other people all the time they could be making money around here and in industry general in small but significant chunks, but they don't seem to come pouring out of the woodwork.

If you look at the consumption side after output, either you are so good that you are working all the time for bigco, or, you are walking around with a portfolio trying to get in. If the Game Developer Showcase, the IDGA awards, other game competition awards sponsored by other game development entities as well as academic interests were sampled, you'd could say that the dev side of product output is either limited or slow, because managing amateur teams is so challenging.

Facility provided for virtual blackboarding and file transfer for projects requiring art assets were available, as well as the other assets involved, production would increase, and the opportunity for artists would as well.

I was raised by an artist, and I am used to seeing work really productively developed, and I used to wonder why game art was so sort of intangible as something to plug into a production idea of my own for games design even as I networked, until I began producing just small amounts of it for webs and tiny commercial animated banners. Good art is kind of really in short supply.

Adventuredesign

It depends I guess.. if you just want to become "good" I would
guess it might be faster to learn game art/graphics. However,
if you want to become a really good artist or a programmer you
are looking at large amounts of work and time either way.
Quality work never comes cheap, that is what I've learned
anyway :P :)

Quote:Original post by sunandshadow
I think maybe it takes longer to become a programmer good enough to make games than it does to become an artist good enough to make games, what do you all think?

Hello,

I do not think there is a time problem.

Programming is just applying some logic, this is something that everybody can do. Of course, there are still some difference between Carmack and the average programmer. Everybody can learn programming (and there is no such things as game programming and non-game programming. It is programming. Believe me, I'm not a game programmer but I still have the same problems to solve).

Artist are artists. This is something you have in you. I'm unable to paint something, unable to model something good. I'm not an artist at all. I may learn during 2^32 years if I can, I'll never be an artist.

So, basically, it do not take more time to be a good programmer than to be a good artist : you can learn to program, but yo cannot learn to be an artist.

These were my own thoughts about this particular subject :)

Truly,

Programming is a very concentrated field. If someone wants to be a programmer they follow a few well defined paths and fall into a few well defined categories. It's not a bad thing, it's just how it works out. If you say you want to be a game programmer no one asks "Well, what kind of game programmer?" because there really aren't that many different kinds to be (it's sorta a jack-of-all-trades profession).
So it feels like there's a lot of game programmers because a high percent of them wind up in places like this, as there isn't a lot of alternate places to go or things to do.

A hobbiest artist has many more options available to them. Art skills translate into countless different fields and industries. If someone wants to be a game artist they could do concept design, architectural layouts, character modelling, rigging, animating, skinning, environmental art, or special effects. All these hobbiest artists aren't hanging around in one place because they're too diversified for that. You get little pockets of them here and there, and it feels like there are too few of them to go around. In reality there is just too many different kinds of art for a lot of people to do each one.