Terry Smith, the president and founder of Terry Smith Creations as well as an art director at Electronic Arts, shared his stories and experience with the students on September 1st. Terry has worked in the creative field for more than 35 years. He worked on many projects that include film & television, video games, sports franchises, toys, etc. before joining on at Electronic Arts.
Terry gave us a lecture about game development based on an art standpoint. In the initial stages of video games, only engineers developed games. However, artists started to get involved in game development and the graphics of games have become important. The early stage’s pixel art has changed to photorealistic art. Like this, he mentioned that we are coming into a very pivotal transitional time in the game industry.
Terry explained that a frustrating thing for him is that people could get so specialized in this industry they don’t even have an idea or concept of what somebody else is doing. So he encouraged us to learn as much as we can about different areas and look around see a lot of different things. The idea was about working with a lot of different people, not one person. Because all the engineers, designers and artists are going to deal with different companies and different divisions such as marketing, sales, etc.
It was very nice and inspiring having him here with us.
