Maybe this is a stupid question, but I’ve been told by professors that many developers have a hard time finding artists to design their games https://routerlogin.uno/​ (if they don’t have the desire/skill/time to do it themselves).

Is this true and something to keep in mind when improving my own skills, or were they just creating a needless fear?

Students in game development programs have a hard time to find artists. When I was teaching game courses, my students had more trouble finding art help than anything else.

In the professional game industry, artists are totally easy to find. When I was performing HR duties for a small indie dev company in Los Angeles, we were constantly flooded by artist applications. When I was producing at a AAA company, I frequently received art portfolios (and audio demo reels).

If you check out our Hobby Project Classifieds forum (click Forums at left, then click Browse up top, then scroll down to find it), you'll find lots of aspiring artists and those who provide art assets (and lots and lots of music composers). Also if you click Portfolios at left, you'll see lots of art portfolios.

Your professor was talking about game development in academia, not in the game dev world.

Also, your question is more a Production/Management question than an Art Critique question, so this has been moved to that more appropriate forum.

Finally, I have to wonder why you ask. Are you worried about finding artists to help you? Or is there some other reason why this thing your prof said is so “fear” inducing?

Finding artists is easy. Finding good, reliable, cheap artists is hard, and you'll probably need to compromise on all three points. Don't even bother looking for artists willing to work for free; that's a waste of not just your time but also theirs.

Go over the reddit, artstation etc, and you can find tons of them. If you want them for a hobby project or rev-share project, that's a different story. You generally have to shell out some money and sometimes there are scams online, but to be fair most seem OK. That being said the quality varies a lot. Quite a few do anime which is not my thing. Some do art which is not bad, but after a while it seems like many of them came out of the same school and it starts to look verry “stock” to me. Sometimes you can almost guess what country or region they are from by looking at the art.

If you do want to hire an artist, I would look at a lot of art first, and get some idea of what you like. As a non-artist It's taken me some time to form an opinion on that. There are some quite unique artists out there if you look around.

You get what you pay for. As others wrote, there is no difficulty finding people for paid positions if you're willing to pay at or above market rates.

Each discipline has ebbs and flows in their community, where it's easier or harder to get good rates, so negotiation there is normal. But ultimately if a company doesn't pay fair rates word will get around and people will leave for places that do.

Companies that lowball their workers tend to quickly become a race to the bottom in terms of quality. That in turn means they churn through workers, so lots of people get a bad experience. Eventually they'll struggle to find workers, except for those desperate for work. Companies that maintain great rates attract the best workers who never want to leave, and as long as the company keeps increasing rates people will rarely choose to leave, so turnover is low. Few people get those jobs, but they're the ones people seek out and will spend time searching for if they're not under pressure. Combine the two and it heavily skews people's view of the workforce.

ganatbasa said:

Is this true and something to keep in mind when improving my own skills, or were they just creating a needless fear?

The issue is finding high-quality artists to work for free to make your vision.

If you want them to work for free, (1) they'll be of lesser quality, which is often fine, especially for your first few projects, and (2) they'll often want to share creative control of the project.

For example, if you are bringing “programming” as your skillset, and they are bringing “art skills” as theirs, why would they bring their talent only for you to control all the fun game design decision-making?

There is not any lack of artists out there. There are tens of thousands of skilled ones, and hundreds of thousands of decent-enough ones.

But you gotta ask yourself, what do artists themselves want from a project? It ends up being alot of the same things you yourself may want:

- Money
- Interesting project to work on
- Clear focus and direction
- Equally skilled teammates (i.e. don't expect top-class artists to work for free for programmers only in their first half-dozen years of learning how to code)
- An opportunity to help steer it creatively (not just “give suggestions” that may be ignored)

Basically, you can't just be “the idea guy” and expect others to do labor for you for free. Nor can you begin projects and expect others to jump onboard on day one. Almost everyone has been burned dozens of times by joining projects that never go anywhere, so people (including artists) want to see that your project is already very far along development before contributing free labor, if at all.

But here's the reason why this shouldn't bother you:

1. For the first few projects you make, you don't need quality art anyway. It's not going to impede your projects at all. If a game is great, people don't care how bad the art is. And if you're just learning, it doesn't harm anything to use bad art.
2. There are tens of thousands of free art assets artists have made available for anyone to use. It isn't all of the same art style, but you can find enough free things to get your projects through the early stages of development.
3. As you get better in programming, you'll learn techniques for how to make your game generate some of your art for you. (this can be difficult, though. Expect to put two or three years into your programming journey before you start walking down that route)
4. If you start making a project that is genuinely really truly interesting and far along in development, artists will often offer to join your team. (making a game that good is highly unlikely to happen for your first few projects though)
5. If you start making a project that is genuinely commercial-worthy, gamers will pay you money with early-access and crowdfunding, allowing you to hire artists. (again, highly unlikely for your first few projects)

Its super easy to find artists. Especially those who agree to do you a low polygon spaceship within 2 hours. For some reason, it will just take 6 weeks, and he will never show up again. You are better to just google the content for yourself. There are free, or licensable content out there. Or just made your own content. Gimp is super easy once you use it for more than a few days.