When you study game art at Full Sail University, you’ll learn lots of practical technical skills to help you design games. However, you’ll also pick up several key "soft" skills in the program. While they may not come with a manual or a tutorial, these interpersonal and professional skills are just as important for career success.

Effective Communication

Communicating effectively – both verbally and in writing – is essential in game art because of the detailed and collaborative nature of this work.

“There are lots of forms this takes for us,” says Chad Kendall, Program Director for game art. “There are lots of situations where students have to reflect on their projects, like a simple summary or postmortem of their work.”

He says hiring managers often ask job candidates to explain their work and how they’ve overcome any challenges, so getting this practice in their courses is a big help.

In the Visual Realization course, for instance, students learn the art of an elevator pitch in order to concisely talk about their work in a job interview or at a conference. Plus, they learn to do critiques with their peers and how to go about providing constructive criticism and removing one’s personal feelings from these situations.

Teamwork/Collaboration

In game art, many professionals work with team members as part of a pipeline.

“You need to be able to be comfortable in saying, ‘Yeah, I can get on that,’ or, ‘I'm not quite sure how to tackle this. Can somebody help me?’”

In the online curriculum, the Game Production course requires game art students to collaborate with students in game design.

“Their grades are based off of the communication that they do with the other team members, how often they're communicating with them, making sure they're hitting certain marks that have been requested from other team members, things like that,” he explains of this class.

Time Management

The monthly structure of the courses helps game art students learn time management skills early on.

“They get used to weekly milestones that they have to hit,” he explains. “We'll either have projects that can fit into a week, or we'll have things where they're going to be working on the same thing all month, in which case they've got to hit certain milestones or they're going to get behind.”

One observation he has made is that when students have to meet deadlines set by their peers, they are often more motivated to do so compared to meeting their own deadlines.

Some of the classes in which students learn to set and meet their own deadlines include Project and Portfolio IV, Project and Portfolio V, Project and Portfolio VI, and Visual Realization.

Creative problem-solving

Chad believes finding creative solutions to problems is the backbone of the design process in game art since there are so many approaches students can take to create things.

“There's not always a set way to do anything,” he says. “A lot of times, students [are] like, ‘How do I do this?’ Then you're like, ‘Oh, there's a number of ways to do that.’ And so it really does come down to how you want to tackle certain types of things.”

Critical thinking

Students also have to think critically when learning to use industry-standard design software like Unreal Engine and Autodesk Maya.

“There are a lot of situations where tasks can be automated,” he says. “And so, it does end up being like, ‘Do I want to muscle through this or do I want to work on some automation for these types of things?’”

The Bottom Line

Chad knows that soft skills often take time to develop as students graduate and begin their careers. Plus, some are more relevant in certain environments than others.

“I tend to see them be reflected as skills that fit into every industry,” he says. “The biggest thing is just being aware of the culture of the team that you're going to work for, and that will really help guide you.”