During at Casual Connect USA, art director for XMG Studio Lyndsey Gallant shared her role in the studio transforming from an unfocused and financially inefficient company to the innovative and sustainable studio that it is today. In fact, “concentrating on art as the main component of our games completely changed our company strategy”, confirmed Lyndsey. XMG Studio has transformed from a large licensing-focused studio with 50 employees to a much smaller six people team that now makes original IPs and art-driven projects. Join Lyndsey as she describes the best practices and insights on this transition.
Lyndsey Gallant is art director of XMG Studio in Toronto, Canada, where she has been instrumental in the company’s evolving focus on making original IPs and experimental art-driven projects. She has mastered both the professional and personal sides of creating amazing games and has an unprecedented artistic range in the games industry. She shared with Casual Connect her thoughts about using her art to enrich people’s lives.
Casual Connect: Tell us about the work you do at XMG Studio. How did you come to work here?
Lyndsey: As the Art Director at XMG Studio, I handle visual development, visual research and concept art for our games. That being said, my responsibilities at the studio extend to a few other roles (as I’m sure most indie developers or people at small startups can relate to). I also handle a great deal of UI/UX design/creation, production art, creative direction and audio design direction.
Surprisingly, I landed a job at XMG the “old fashioned way”: they had a posting up on their website, and I applied for it. It was for a job as a 2D Generalist, but the specific project required a lot of background paintings and, in a stroke of luck, that happens to be my area of expertise, so I landed the job.
CC: How have your past career experiences been helpful to you in your current position?
Lyndsey: Like most art directors, I started my career out doing production art. I believe it’s incredibly important for anyone managing an art team or doing high-level visual development work to be very attuned to what it’s like to actually create the final product and have an intimate knowledge of what that entails.
CC: What do you do in your free time? What are your hobbies?
Lyndsey: At the risk of sounding one-dimensional, art is a really important part of my life and identity – both inside and outside of work. I spend a lot of time sketching, painting and designing for personal projects. I recently started oil painting, and I feel the inherent restraints of the traditional medium have helped me to be more critically analytical in my digital work.
Beyond my art, I’m an avid gamer, marathon runner, amateur chef, and rabbit owner. I love trying out anything new or challenging that I can learn from. For instance, I just took a modern dance class because it was so different from what I do day-to-day. I was pretty horrible; it was great experience!
CC: What is your favorite thing about your job?
Lyndsey: Getting to work as part of a team is without a doubt my favourite part of the job. As an art director, you can help people break out of their comfort zone, see their art from a new perspective, and otherwise aid people in achieving things they may be unable to if they were working alone. I also work with an absolutely incredible group of talented, wonderful people, which certainly helps! I look forward to getting to work every single day and my team is a big part of that.
CC: What inspired you to pursue this career?
Lyndsey: Art and games have always been among the great loves of my life. From an early age, I identified the fact that a large proportion of adult life is occupied by work, so I wanted to make sure I was spending that time doing something I love.
Games have the ability to bring people together, offer fun and escapism during difficult times in life and make people feel joy. There is so much opportunity and possibility for games to enrich the lives of so many people across the world. In that sense, I want to enrich people’s lives in the way the creators of my favourite games have enriched my own.
CC: Do you have any advice for someone interested in pursuing the same career?
Lyndsey: Be honest with yourself. This is not something to pursue half-heartedly or because you simply enjoy playing video games. Speaking from the perspective of an artist, you will need to work incredibly hard to get to the skill level required to be able to break into this career at all. Luckily, if you truly love it, the hard work will be enjoyable, because it essentially boils down to: draw all the time. Draw constantly. Be critical of your work. Seek feedback from your peers. Then draw a whole lot more. It really is that simple.
CC: What was your dream job as a child?
Lyndsey: My childhood dream job isn’t far off the mark from what I do now. When I was very, very young I wanted to be an animator at Disney. I always loved when the Disney channel had those behind-the-scenes clips between the shows that showed the animators at work in their studio, or when they showed what the hand-drawn animation key frames looked like. It absolutely enchanted me.
CC: In your younger years, was there anything that hinted at your future career path in gaming? Did you expect to end up where you are today?
Lyndsey: I grew up in a very pro-gaming household, which I am very grateful for. When I was six years old I was really into the original Warcraft. I used to play it with my Dad all the time, and it inspired an era of drawing gory scenes of dragons decapitating people, which would go on to trouble my teachers for many years to come.
So this was back in the day when game instruction manuals were as lovingly crafted as they were necessary, and the Warcraft manuals were adorned with original concept art (done in graphite even), by Metzen and Samwise. I had never seen art like this before, and I was entranced by it. I remember bringing the manual to my Dad one afternoon and asking, “Dad, what are these?”
“The people who made the game drew these to design what the characters would look like.” It totally blew my mind.
“I want to do that when I grow up.”
Even as a kid and a teenager, I was on a total warpath to become a game artist. I cared about it more than anything. I had a laser focus on my goal that was unflinching, to the extent that my childhood friends even had a term for when someone bailed on a party or gathering to work – it was called “Pulling a Lynds.” Ultimately, I worked my ass off, so being where I am isn’t surprising, though I am extremely appreciative.
CC: When and how did you first become interested in art?
Lyndsey: Art was always something I was magnetized to. Most people enjoy art when they’re young, that isn’t anything special. My parents and teachers were always very, very encouraging of my art from an early age, and I’m sure that helped me stick with it and made me want to practice a whole lot more.
CC: What is your creative process like? Where do you begin?
Lyndsey: I always start with visual research – but very importantly, I try not to reference from the same medium I’m creating, especially in the early stages. I will not look at other game art for defining the visual style of a game. That’s a surefire way to be derivative and played-out with your work. Instead, I try to look to film, fine art, fashion, graphic design, food or the world around me for inspiration cues.
From there I start making concept art. The first passes at concept art are for figuring out general things like colour palette, style and even less tangible things like mood/atmosphere. As those solutions start to become more actualized, I’ll move on to more specific concept art such as particular characters, environments, etc.
My approach for production art is to work iteratively, quickly, critique often, and work in stages from linear roughs and colour roughs, keeping it loose before committing to any one design.
CC: Where do you find the most inspiration for your designs? What was the most interesting thing you found inspiration from?
Lyndsey: As I mentioned, I try to look for atypical (non-game) sources of visual reference. My favourite instance of this was working on our upcoming narrative game Project Giants (working title). We were looking at molecular gastronomy photographs. There was such a thoughtful variety of colours and textures present. When looking at silhouette design and shape language, we were referencing the sculptural works of Henry Moore. The combination of these two totally disparate ideas has culminated to something really interesting that we’re pretty excited about.
CC: If you had unlimited resources and time, what type of game would you create?
Lyndsey: I feel that eliciting introspection in your audience is the highest goal that art can achieve. Making people think about their lives, choices and feeling in a productive way – that’s immensely powerful. I’ve been having a lot of thoughts lately about the often debilitating paradox of choice and how this relates to love. I’d want to explore those sorts of themes and stories in an interactive narrative game. I feel like that format of game and how easily playable it could be could become part of the meta of the narrative itself, in a way.
CC: What is the most challenging part of game development for you? What is the most rewarding part?
Lyndsey: Probably the most challenging part of the job is the idea that the most purist, artistic approach to creating something isn’t always the best way to do it. Making art for a general audience and making art for other artists are very different, and while identifying that difference has become fairly easy for me now (with practice), bringing the hammer on those kinds of creative decisions can sting at times. Sometimes you have to make things you don’t personally like or believe in because it will be more accessible to more people. At the end of the day, that’s the most important thing, accessibility and clear communication.
The most rewarding part for me is just having people genuinely enjoy the games we make. People live busy lives. Life can be hard and stressful. For example, if a super overworked woman who has kids and a career and a totally full life takes twenty minutes of her precious downtime to unwind and play one of our games, that’s incredible. It’s huge. What a powerful thing to be able to provide for someone you’ve never met.
CC: How do you handle creative blocks? Do creative blocks occur frequently?
Lyndsey: Honestly, I don’t really experience creative blocks. Visual art, just like coding, audio design or building a bookshelf, has a logical and formulaic approach to creation. Surely some creative problems are easier to solve than others, but following a logical approach, working quickly and iteratively, and talking through the approach with other artists on the team will always see it through eventually.
CC: What has been your proudest moment in your career so far? What led to this moment happening?
Lyndsey: The proudest moment of my career was admittedly pretty small, but it was symbolic for me. Our studio had a table at a local game festival where we were selling a bit of merch and we had our upcoming game, Gastrobots, out for people to try. It was a pretty busy festival, but out of the crowd, this fairly young kid – maybe seven years old – wordlessly grabbed one of the devices from the table and played the game with quiet, laser focus for about twenty minutes. Twenty minutes in mobile game time is fairly long, never mind from a kid in an incredibly noisy, distracting environment with tons of stimulation. It was really incredible to see that implied interaction between a developer and a gamer first hand, wordless and pure like that. It made me think about the thousands and thousands of people who play our games and all the opportunities we’re afforded to be able to reach people in a meaningful way.
CC: What do you think will be the next big trend in the industry in the next three to five years? How are you incorporating this trend into your future plans?
Lyndsey: I feel like we’re going to see even more bold experimentation with visual styles and directions in the coming years. We’re in a really interesting era now where the general public is more open to the idea that “more realism” isn’t always the best thing. An entire generation of young gamers are being exposed to (and absolutely loving) Minecraft – a game with a visual style defined largely by retro game graphics. The audience’s openness to these differing visual approaches offers creators an incredible and unprecedented era of creativity. The questions we’re asking of our games can change from “how do we make it realistic?” to “what art style will enrich our gameplay and help tell our story?”
I feel we’re also going to see more varied representation in our games; for games to be told from an ever-growing array of perspectives in regards to race, gender, age, atypical narrative themes, etc. As mobile and casual games break down the barrier of entry for people to engage in games, and the definition of what a “Gamer” is becomes broader and more inclusive, I feel we’re going to see a greater demand for more varied content in our games. Games as a medium have so much potential as an art form, and I think we’re going to see this truly begin to take shape in the coming years.
Our approaches at XMG definitely reflect these two concepts. We aren’t a studio which has one art style across our games (which is a totally acceptable approach, just not ours). We let the game design direct our visual approach. Game design is always the most important aspect; the visuals are designed to enrich and reinforce that. In terms of representation, we pick a similar approach. We make our characters racially and gender neutral if possible, so more people can identify with aspects of the game. We design the content of our games based on wanting to deliver the best experience to as many people as possible. Games are for everyone, and everyone should be able to relate to the games they love.
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