Hi. My name is Marie Lazar. I'm a 3-D environment artist and I love video games. I've loved video games ever since I was a kid. I remember playing classic point-and-click adventure games like Mist and the Secret of Monkey Island and being fascinated by the weird and colorful worlds they showed me. Hungry for more, I started writing my own game guides and drew maps and made up islands. Extending my favorite games with my imagination. Later on I got a Nintendo 64, and then my first Game Boy, and that was how I spent my childhood, reading, drawing, and playing lots and lots of video games. In high school, I kept drawing, but it wasn't something I took seriously. I liked art, but I didn't believe I could make a career out of it, at least not one that I liked. The summer before my senior year, though, I went to a game design summer camp at a nearby community college. There they showed us how to make levels in the Unreal Engine, and basic modelling in 3DS Max. This was amazing to me. Before that, I had never given any real thought to how games were made. I just figured they were made by engineers or possibly robots. Sitting in a room, typing 1's and 0's into computers. Making levels in Unreal felt much more real than drawing them on paper and it made me feel like making video games was a thing I could actually do. After high school I attended the nearest big state college, Michigan State. I picked communication arts as my major because I had all of the game development classes. Because of my high standardized test scores from high school I was able to get a student job working on games for research in one of the university's labs. That was my first real experience making games. Artists were in short supply in the lab and I had an advantage because of the drawing I had done in high school. So I quickly ended up specializing in art. My job was essentially to learn how to make whatever the designers asked for. I ended self teaching myself a lot of things but my favorite thing to do was making environments. I took whatever game centered classes I could and made a point of joining the school's game development club, Spartasoft. I also picked up studio art as a second major and used it to take more classes and drawing and oil painting. After I graduated MSU, I figured I was probably good enough to get a job in the industry, but it definitely would not have been a job I was excited about. I applied at Savannah College of Art and Design for graduate school in part because I wanted more time to develop my skills and in part because I was curious how an art school would compare to a large state school, like MSU. MSU had been very focused on designing games and building them in a team. All of my digital arts skills had been self-taught, and I hoped that going to an art school would help fill in the gaps. In grad school, I had a lot more time to focus on hand painting textures, something that had piqued my interest while at MSU. After a year though, I decided to finish my degree early and switched from the two year program to the one year program. I liked being there, but it felt too much like I was hiding from the real world. Around the same time Blizzard Entertainment announced that they were having a student art contest to see who can make the best 3D scene in the style of World of Warcraft. I thought, yes, this is perfect for me! And I spent the next three months laboring over my entry while finishing my last classes. To my surprise, I won the contest and was offered a summer internship working on World of War Craft. I spent that summer after grad school making plants and trees for the Mist of Panderia expansion, and generally learning how development goes at a studio as big as Blizzard. After the internship was over, I figured I´d had a taste of what it was like working on AAA games, but I wanted to see if I could make it as an Indie. I really missed making smaller games by myself and with my friends. So I flew back to my hometown in Michigan, moved in with my parents and started freelancing out of their basement. Some of my old classmates had jobs by then and helped me get freelance work with their companies. During this time I went back to being an artist generalist, I made all kinds of assets for game pitches, proof of concept prototypes, educational games, and even a point and click adventure. I had more freedom and creative control than before, but the projects were also much lower profile than they had been at Blizzard. I continued freelancing for a little over a year. I liked the jobs that I was working on and I have some nice portfolio pieces to show for it. But living with my parents was making me seriously depressed and I wasn't making enough money to move out. When I got an offer out of the blue to go work at Goodgames Studios in Hamburg, Germany, I was happy to take it. I didn't know anything about the company other than that they made free to play games and were apparently very successful at it, but I missed working in a studio and Hamburg sounded better than my parent's basement. So I accepted. You always hear about the importance of sending out lots of applications and forming connections at companies. But in this case, I didn't, either. I had my portfolio website and LinkedIn profile, of course. But I suspect it was my internship at Blizzard, combined with my graduate degree that made me an appealing prospect for them. Several months later, I got my visa and moved here to Hamburg, where I've been for the past year and a half now. I'm back to working as a environment artist again, and I spend most of my days modeling and texturing props to dress levels with. I spent the first five months here working on the free to play game Shadow Kings, making assets that were entirely rendered 3D. But since then the studio has made the decision to branch out into other genres including real time 3D games. So that's what I'm working on now. Luckily, the team I'm on is flexible enough that I also get a chance to occasionally branch out into characters or concept art. And I always have a personal project or two on the side. It's been a weird journey so far and I can't say where it will go from here but I'm optimistic. My advice is to be open to all opportunities, even ones you don't expect. Work harder than you think you need to, and always be polite and helpful to the people you meet, even if you don't think they can help you. My best connections aren't people I reached out to per se, but classmates and teachers I met while I was in school, they're the people who helped me find work when I was freelancing and helped me get job offers at their companies. Always work hard, be bold, kick ass and make games.
