Happy Hutch-A-Versary to Andy! He’s celebrating 8 years as an Art Director at Hutch. Keep reading to find out why he’s stuck around for so long and what you should NEVER include in your art portfolio!

The Basics

Q. How many years of Hutch are you celebrating?

A. Eight years! That’s a long time to spend at one studio and it’s passed by very quickly. It has been a journey but a good one to date.

Q. What bought you to Hutch?

A.I needed a job! I was working for Zynga when they shut down most of their overseas studios and moved development back to the USA. There were probably less than twenty people at Hutch when I started and we only had one title in development, so a very different studio to where we are today. I originally only planned to stay for a year or so, but liked the work, culture and people so much I stayed a little longer!

Q. What’s your role at Hutch?

A.I look after the Marketing Art Team which is a crazy busy part of the studio. We create all the ads for our four live games in house, along with app store art, icons, banners and so forth. I work alongside eight genuinely talented artists and an equally talented producer - they also all happen to be extremely lovely people so I consider myself very fortunate. We doubled in size as team last year and due to the pandemic only half the team have met in person. Hopefully we’ll get to rectify this soon :)

Being a Hutchie

Q. What’s been your favourite moment at Hutch?

A.There have been a few, I’ve been lucky enough to attend F1 pre season testing in Barcelona and I took part in the SpecialEffect Twin Town Challenge a few years back - look SpecialEffect up, it’s a very special charity.

Q. What three words best describe your time at Hutch so far?

A.Fun, honest and open

Your role

Q. What’s the most important thing you’ve learnt at Hutch?

A.Talk to each other. Every situation you are going to encounter will have a better outcome if you talk. Not communicating is where things start to go a bit pear-shaped.

Q. What’s been your biggest challenge?

A.That’s happening now and it involves everyone in the studio. Keeping the culture that made Hutch a great place to be when we were twenty people work for a studio that’s now well over one hundred and growing.

Q. What advice would you give to someone interested in doing a similar role?

A.I was a dev artist for a very long time and before that a traditional artist doing illustration work. I got into games at a moment in time when there weren’t that many actual ‘artists’ around, many in the industry had started out as coders.

I’d say its harder to break into games now than it was in my day, more competition too for roles. The flip side is that there are many more studios now and an art career is possible within the industry without being on the dev side.
So my advice would be to keep your options open, don’t limit yourself to a single role - ‘I want to be a character artist and nothing else will do’ isn’t going to get you very far.

Don’t stress about what software is best, listen and take on board feedback (especially the feedback you don’t like!) and concentrate simply on being the best artist you can be. Learn the basics, draw trees, buildings, understand lighting and perspective. All the boring stuff you don’t think is important actually is. Last point, don’t put a dragon in your portfolio unless it’s the best dragon in the world ever!

Car Stuff

Q. Do you have to be a petrolhead to work at Hutch? How much do you like cars?

A.You absolutely don't need to be a petrolhead to work at Hutch, I don't have a car although I'm fond of motorcycles. 

[Andy’s BMW R 1250 GS RALLYE TE pictured below]

Q. What would be your dream car?

A.My dream car would be small as I'm not really into large cars - probably a Toyota Yaris GR, that would be fun to drive (and still easy to park!)

Fancy joining Hutch? Check out our latest vacancies here: https://www.hutch.io/careers