Do I have to be good at art to work in a game company?

You definitely do not have to be good at art!

While having a broad skill base is always a good thing in general, many, if not most video games are made by teams of people, all specialized.

It is common to have the programmers and the artists working at the same time, and if the programmers are working on something which doesn't have art yet, they just use a simple filler picture, like a stick figure or a colored rectangle, and know that later, once it has been created by the artists, they can combine the two.

This is true both on the large scale and the small scale. StarCraft, a video game released in 1998, was made by a large number of people. Its credits are listed here: http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/starcraft/credits and you can see that they have completely separate sections for "programming" tasks and for "artist" tasks. A much more recent video game, Bastion, was created by just seven people, two of whom were programmers and one was an artist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastion_(video_game)).

In short, it is entirely feasible for you to focus on becoming a good computer programmer and team up with artists. You will always be more successful if you work with the artists the entire time, instead of either trying to write a game around a bunch of pictures they gave you, or writing an entire game and then trying to find artists to draw it for you, but that does not require you to have artistic skill of your own.

Hi Michael,

If you can't draw.. do not worry! There are several different roles in the game-making industry. The most common roles/disciplines are:

• Software Engineers (aka Computer Programmers)


• Artists (broken down into Environment Artists, Character Artists, Animators, Concept Artists, User Interface Designers, etc.)


• Game Designers


• Producers


• Product Managers


• Quality Assurance

All of the above are necessary in order to make a video game. Being good at art is only required if you want to be an artist. You can research more about the roles I described above through web searches. Hope this helps!

No you don't have to be good at art!

Art is a separate person or team. The industry doesn't expect an artist to program nor a programmer to make art. I'd say it's safe to just learn to be the best programmer you can be! (Although, as an artist in the industry, it is a very fun and rewarding career choice for me personally!)

Programmers typically don't produce art. However, I would make sure you can diagram your thoughts to communicate how you plan to do something and document how things work.

Hi Michael,
Although you don't need to be an artist, knowing the basics about the tools used for graphic design will help you. Game companies also may need people to work on a website. So, the software they use could be Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. Knowing enough to be able to edit vector and raster graphics might help you gain the edge when looking for work. But most companies won't expect you to be an artist and programmer. They will most likely already have people doing that work. I'd also bet that the artists won't want to program either! :)

A good example is that if a programmer understands the basics of UI/UX design, then they can better communicate with a UI/UX designer. If a UI/UX designer understands the basics about website development and performance, then it will help him to create better designs.

The most important thing is to decide what you like to do. Then the career will follow. Never force yourself. You will end up not being happy in the long run. If you like games and game programming. Then always learning will be fun for you. Anything technology related requires constant learning.

It looks like you have your answer! You don't need to draw the pictures yourself to make a good game. The only thing that I would add is that it might be helpful for you to take a few art classes anyway, if you can. This will show you how artists look at things, and give you some good talking tools for when you are communicating with artists (which you will be doing). A lot of times, programmers and artists are speaking the same language but they still don't understand each other. Having a few art classes under your belt even if you are a programmer is going to help you out tons!

(Same goes for artists - they should take some basic coding classes too!)

As everyone has answered above you don't need to be good at art to work in a video game company. However, to make the highest quality game experiences you will need to partner closely with artists and other creative types. Making a video game isn't about having someone pass art assets to you to incorporate in to a game but is a collaborative back and forth experience. Every discipline (whether engineering, art, or design) will bring along with it a unique perspective and passion.