Game Artist Intern Review

It was a great experience and the work was very enjoyable! I got to draw, paint and iterate on various things required for the project and had a fun time doing so! The supportive nature and the closeness of the art team was awesome. The art directors were very supportive, patient and kind as well.

The teams I were in had quite different needs in terms of art one leaning more to iteration and the other to quick ideas but both valued my work and helped me on if it wasn't quite up to expectations. My art directors especially helped me feel valued and included and often came by and gave me input and advice.

When it comes to art it can generally be a bit difficult to approach a person with critique as each person reacts differently but the art directors were very well aware of this and knew how to approach the problem well. We had sessions were we would talk about what I would like to improve upon and how we could mesh that into what I was working on.

They kept me quite busy with tasks as I specifically asked to have quite a lot on my plate as that is how I generally like it, as such I rarely sat twirling my thumbs. It fluctuated a bit in the beginning, setting up etc took some time, and at times they didn't know what to have me work on but I tried to fill that space by doing something useful.

I feel like I was doing things that were required on the projects and never something useless and as such was given the responsibility of an artist. However I wasn't included much on the kanban which lead to no deadlines. This could be seen as removing some responsibility but I felt like it worked out well.

It was a great experience and there was a lot of knowledge to absorb about not just art but the gaming industry as a whole and I learned a lot especially from all the presentations/talks. Obviously having that in-house experience at a company like King is very valuable to other employers as well.

It was a great atmosphere and the office in London was superb. I'm not sure London fit me as a person very well but once inside the office it was great! The people have all gone through a long process to make sure we all a few base values that were important to the company and I feel like that brought the atmosphere together.

It was a bit of a hassle setting up all the programs and hardware at the start but that was a tiny part of an overall well put together internship. I especially liked trying out being in 2 very different teams as I could see how pre-production and production both played out.

We did have quite a lot of talks that taught us more generally about various aspects of working in a company. As King is now a part of Activision Blizzard King there was quite a lot of material to get through in terms of how to act towards other people etc that spanned across these 3 companies. There was also access to a lot of material specialized towards artist that I could've used and a collection of books for artists as well. This was all quite general and available to everyone so I'm not sure I would say the company invested in me per se to improve. The sessions with the art directors are probably the closest thing to specialized training I can think of as it set up goals for you to try and meet.

Very appealing and would've loved to continue to work for them.

Yes, we had a chat channel and many of the interns would go out and eat, socialize and what have you. Some of us even made a little mini game after work hours for one of King's hack days which some of the seniors helped us realize. In general it was a good atmosphere amongst all of the interns. King also helped us get a bit closer by having us do team exercises and various activities.

The rent was around 700-1300 pound I believe and the other cost racked it up to being quite expensive area to live in. I didn't do any socialising so I cannot say much about that but in general I think London was quite expensive and 700-1300 pounds was for an airbnb room.

King was located in the middle of Soho so I assume it would be good but I know very little about these things as they interest me not.

Every so often we would have life painting lessons with the art team which you could attend to. I have to say I didn't quite follow the outside of work scene very close as I had other matters to attend on off work hours and didn't seek them out but I'm sure there would've been if I looked more closely.