I'm pretty sure this response I sent scared them off but I think this is maybe the most fundamental thing I'd indicate to absolutely anyone looking to get into Art Jobs in any form; if you love making stuff for you that may be an indication you're good at making stuff for other people too but it doesn't necessarily mean you'd enjoy doing so, vs, like, finding it makes you miserable, and that's an important distinction
Here's the thing, even when you 'make it' and get into a position where you can shove through all your ideas, even then, that's... not really how it works.
Even on the very small Fallen London team. I'm the lead creative on that game. Most of my job is hearing what other people want to do and facilitating that.
Almost everything we've done in the last year started life as someone else's pitch; my role is usually "cool, here's how I think we should go about making the best version of that." The role of 'vision setting' in my context is more about setting parameters: here's the edges of the playground, here's where we go and where we don't go, here's themes and tones and must-haves and goals and ungoals. I didn't come up with the main Horticultural Show plot, or the Piebald Dreamer, or [character that will be very important in a future story that you haven't met yet] or [place that you will visit in a future story that you haven't been to yet].
Don't get me wrong, I do pursue my own ideas and they do make it into the game, and I have a great degree of freedom to do so. But the practical reality is I can't be the originator of every single thing without making the game terrible in the process, and I don't want to be.
Even when someone is making fundamental creative decisions – what kind of game are we making, what it's about, and so on – the actual result is going to be very far out of their hands. Especially if it's supposed to be any good. Even the most auteur-ass people I know of in the industry, who produce great work, are doing so through deeply collaborative processes.
I think there's often a perception, especially from younger folks who don't have those kinds of experiences, that facilitating someone else's vision is an unsatisfying situation that you settle for. And honestly I don't think that's the case. Plenty of people in the industry have creatively unfulfilling jobs (I'm sure it's not very fun to be in the middle of some protracted AAA asset pipeline making textures for crates all day) but my own experience is that, in the right context, serving someone else's vision can be some of the most joyful and fulfilling work you do. One of my favorite things I've ever worked on was a localization project.
Remember, kids, auteur theory is a critical lens to analyze a finished work. It's NOT a development methodology.
