I’ve continued to draw fan art for a few games and anime. Therefore, I was fortunate enough to meet many famous game animation designers in China. This time I interviewed Huang Yiran, who studied animation at Beijing Institute of Technology. Now she works for NetEase Games, a well-known Chinese game company, and serves as the main artist for the game “Onmyoji”. The main artist’s job is not only to review the character designs and illustrations in all games, but also to take care of the production of animated short films related to the characters. This is why I decided to interview her. I asked her a lot about her experience working in a game company.

First, I asked her about the current employment prospects in the game and animation industry in China. She thought for a long time and then sighed.
Nowadays, China has very strong control over games, and many games cannot be put on the market without passing national review. Coupled with the impact of AI, many game and animation companies have laid off a large number of employees. Many departments responsible for preliminary work lost their jobs overnight. In terms of animation, it is difficult for original animators to start their own business. If they want to participate in large-scale projects, they face the problem of heavy workload and low salary.

Then I asked her if she had any good opinions or suggestions for submitting portfolios required by animation and game companies.
She said she could start some long-term projects for her portfolio. For example, before she submitted her resume, she designed six game characters based on the ancient Chinese Book of Mountains and Seas and made short animations for them. During the interview process, the project manager asked her in detail about her thoughts and ideas on the designed role. This will not only improve your language expression skills, but also make people think more clearly when drawing, which will also help the company have a good impression of you.
The portfolio will also need to be modified depending on the company to which it is submitted. If this is a game company and the position you want to apply for is the character design department or peripheral design department, then you should put more of your illustration works and character design works. If this is an animation company, then you should show more of your animation process and clips and reduce the number of illustrations.
Focus on putting works that can reflect your solid painting foundation and rich imagination in the front, which means you will stand out.

At the end, I also expressed what I have always been anxious about. I noticed that nowadays there are more and more software that can assist us in making games and animations, and we have the most things to learn. I always want to try new things to improve my abilities, but I find that I don’t have enough time. How should I balance my time?

She believes that it depends on what kind of company I want to work in in the future and what my plans for the future are. If I hope to produce some very popular projects in a large company in the future, then large companies have very clear job divisions. Even one illustration will be divided into 3 to 5 departments for cooperation. At this time, I need to be very outstanding in one aspect.
If I want to be successful in my fledgling projects, I need to learn a lot of skills and use various methods to present the work to perfection.