1. What exactly does an art director for a video game do (what's your average day at work like)?

JR: My job changes depending on what stage of production the game is currently in. Star Wars Galaxies has been a different experience from any other for me- in scope, and in all the challenges we have faced as a team.

At the beginning, or pre-production stages, I spent the majority of my time hiring artists, and working with our concept artist to come up with a look that will work for our game. These were pretty broad strokes at first. We were looking to nail down how realistic or stylistic we wanted to take the look and we had to figure out what it means to be true to the Star Wars license. Luckily we were working with a great team of people at LucasArts, mainly Haden Blackman, who made it almost effortless.

In the main phase of art production, which has been over the last two years, little by little we started to have some of the technology we needed to be able to see and interact with our artwork in the game. One of my most important responsibilities at this stage is to make sure the art comes together as one living world, instead of a series of pieces of art made by twenty or so different artists. This is where I relied heavily on John Roy and Joe Shoopack, the Art Leads for world and character art.

They manage most of the day-to-day production issues, and I try to keep an eye one the whole picture. During this phase of production, I also stay as current as possible with the design and programming teams. As things change, and they always do, I have to keep up with what is happening so the artists have to do as little rework as possible.

After the huge effort this team has put forward, we are starting to see the rewards. We are mostly doing polish and bug-fixing at this point. These days I’m meeting with Joe and John, and we’re making long lists of final tweaks to the artwork to give the game a more cohesive and solid feel. We have quite a number of assets, so this takes several days to do. Now we are looking for ways to optimize and enhance what we have, and new art production has slowed almost to a stop.