Hello everyone,

Disclaimer: I'm writing this post for a school assignment and I'm sure it's probably been answered numerous times. But for the sake of receiving a passing grade, I must ask anyways… At the same time, I'm also a bit curious for myself.

For anyone that has experience with Technical Art or 3D Programming, what does it entail? I've been heavily considering specializing in this area of game development because of the art/design aspect and would like to know some more about it. Aside from art, I'm interested in gameplay design and would like to know a bit more about that as well. Is there any area of game development where art, writing, and gameplay design cross, or is it somehow possible to be involved in all of them to some capacity? If so, what specialization is the closest to achieving that?

I'm sure there probably isn't a straight forward answer to what I'm asking, here. A lot of these things will likely vary from studio to studio, but I'd like to hear some other takes on the topic.

Raz_Radical said:
Is there any area of game development where art, writing, and gameplay design cross, or is it somehow possible to be involved in all of them to some capacity? If so, what specialization is the closest to achieving that?

Well, i think of technical artists. I'm an industry outsider, but afaict their job is to care about workflow and artwork integration. Likely that means writing code to import output of DCC tools into game engine, automating repetitive content creation tasks, setting up systems of procedural content generation, defining standards how many bones a character skeleton should have, etc. They need to know about various 3rd part DCC and the game engine, while artists usually only know about the former, and programmers only about the latter.
So this would at least bridge ‘3D Programming’ and content creation.

Otherwise it just sounds you want to do multiple things requiring multiple skills, so you want to join a small indie team or make games alone. The lesser people, the lesser specialization, and one guy takes multiple roles.
For large AA(A) studios specialization is key. They won't look for a programming designer Leonardo DaVinci kind of guy. They will look for an artist and for a programmer, both being skilled and specialized to their field. They will also rarely look for a game designer. They will already have related people, likely at senior level with a lot of former experience on other fields after climbing up the career ladder for many years.

I would say start with personal game dev asap. Make small games for a portfolio. It will involve all things you're interested in, but also all the things you're not.
After that, if you get a job, it's most likely specialized on either programming or content creation, not so much on higher level design decisions.