Studios and Studio Roles

In our first CS lecture of this new term, we were told about roles in the games industry and different studios and their way of working. At the end we were told our task, which was to research two studios and two studio roles, and find out as much as we can about them.


Studio roles -

The first studio role I am going to look at is one that I hope to go into myself, Games Artist.
This role splits into various different jobs, including concept artist, 3D modeler, pixel artists, and 2D/texture artists. This a job where you create the visual assets of a game -  the characters, environments, etc. This is a very important job as the look/graphics of a game can be very important and can often be a selling point. As a Games Artist you are supervised by a Lead Artist, who create the assets according to the game and make sure the Games Artists are following the right path in terms of style, as it could range from pixel art to extremely realistic.

The second studio role I chose to look into is Narrative Copywriter.
Simply put, Narrative Copywriters write for video games. They have to make sure that the story works with the design and aesthetic of the games. Almost all of the written content of a video games such as the tutorials, speech of characters or menus will be written by a Narrative Copywriter. They are also responsible for shaping and helping with what the characters say and the story in general.

http://creativeskillset.org/creative_industries/games/job_roles

Studios

The first studio I have decided to look into is Square Enix. Square Enix is a Japanese video game publisher, developer and distribution studio. Their best known games include Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts and Dragon Quest which are all Role-Playing games. The company was formed from the two studios, Square Co. and Enix combining together to form the well known games company we know today on April 1st of 2003. Enix was founded on September 22nd, 1975, and Square Co. was founded in September 1984. Final Fantasy, its biggest and most popular game franchise, has sold over 92 million units worldwide, and Dragon Quest, as its second, has sold 52 million units worldwide. Final Fantasy is well known for its beautiful soundtracks and graphics, as well as immersive story telling. Its no wonder its one of the most popular game franchises. Even this year they are releasing plenty of games, including Final Fantasy XV, a new addition to the main Final Fantasy franchise.

Final Fantasy XV (x)

http://eu.square-enix.com/en/aboutus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_Enix

The second studio I will look at is thatgamecompany, thatgamecompany is an American independent games company founded in 2006. They are a company that strive to make emotional and accessible games, and its obvious with their games Journey, Flower, Cloud and flOw, they have so far succeeded. Their first game was Cloud, created in 2005, before the studio had been founded. They received a a $20,000 grant from their university, the University of Southern California, to make the game. They released it as free to download in the October of that year. By July 2006, the website that had the free download of Cloud had received 6 million visits and the game itself had been downloaded over 600,000 times. Their first official game released under the company name was a remake of the flash game flOw, created by Jenova Chen and Nicholas Clark, released on the PS3 store in 2007. Their second game, Flower -'a video game version of a poem', was released on the PS3 store in 2009, and their latest and most popular game, Journey - 'an anonymous online adventure' was released March 2012.

http://thatgamecompany.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(2012_video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatgamecompany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_(video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(video_game)