Concept Art in Games: A Complete Guide to the Discipline

Environment Concept Art

Landscapes · Architecture · Mood

Establishes where a game takes place. Landscapes, structures, interiors, and atmosphere, all designed so environment artists know what they’re building toward. Whether it’s a crowded city street or an alien surface, the image has to be convincing enough to direct an entire team.

Environment artists guide the viewer’s eye through a composition deliberately. A common technique is placing a human or creature silhouette in the scene to establish scale. Under deadline pressure, many artists block the scene in 3D first and paint over it, or overpaint photographic elements.

Critical skill: perspective. A small error here undermines the entire image, and it’s the first thing an experienced reviewer will notice.

Character Concept Art

Anatomy · Personality · Silhouette

Designs the people a player meets. The goal is characters who read as believable and whose appearance communicates personality, role, and backstory without dialogue. Involves anatomy, proportion, clothing, colour variants, and a great deal of iteration.

Expect most of your designs to be rejected. That’s the normal process rather than a judgment on your ability, and learning not to over-attach to individual pieces is genuinely part of the job.

Critical skill: human anatomy, plus silhouette design strong enough that a character is recognisable in shadow.

Creature Concept Art

Comparative anatomy · Believability

Often merged with character design, but a distinct specialism with its own demands. Designing monsters, beasts, and non-humanoid life requires comparative animal anatomy rather than human anatomy, plus judgment about how a body plan would actually function.

The principle that makes creature design work: players believe even highly alien creatures more readily when they carry recognisable traits from real animals. Grounding a fantasy in observed biology is what separates a convincing creature from a collection of spikes.

Critical skill: animal anatomy and locomotion, plus restraint. Believability comes from internal logic, not from adding more.

Costume and Outfit Design

Materials · Period · Function

Sometimes part of character design, sometimes its own role, particularly at studios making games with extensive cosmetic content. Covers garment construction, how fabric behaves, armour and its articulation, cultural and period references, and how an outfit communicates a character’s status or faction.

Live-service games have expanded this considerably, since cosmetic outfits are both a revenue stream and a continuous content requirement.

Critical skill: material behaviour and garment construction. Clothing that ignores how fabric drapes reads as wrong immediately.

Weapon and Asset Design

Industrial design · Function · Ergonomics

Trickier than it appears. A weapon designer needs to understand how the object would function in reality, which makes a substantial part of the job industrial design research rather than drawing.

An additional constraint specific to games: the weapon has to suit a particular character and read clearly at the distance and angle the player will actually see it from. Weapon designers commonly work in 3D software as part of their process.

Critical skill: mechanical and industrial design literacy. It has to look like it works.

Vehicle Design

Engineering logic · Proportion · Scale

Related to weapon design and equally demanding on the research side. Vehicle designers need a working understanding of how real vehicles are constructed, whether cars, aircraft, ships, or spacecraft, because the machine has to sell the fantasy that it could function.

That engineering grounding then has to be paired with genuine invention. Conventional designs rarely satisfy a brief in this field.

Critical skill: hard-surface construction and perspective at scale, plus enough engineering intuition to make the implausible feel plausible.

Prop Design

Set dressing · Period style · Storytelling

The objects that fill a world and make it feel inhabited. Dragon sculptures in a fantasy setting, ornamented flasks, tools, furniture, signage, debris. Props carry an enormous amount of environmental storytelling for how little attention they individually receive.

Everyday objects are the starting point, then adapted through the art period or cultural style the setting demands. You need to be able to draw an object convincingly from any angle, because the modeller will need exactly that.

Critical skill: observational drawing and stylistic range. Keep a sketchbook, which is advice that applies across every specialism here.

Architectural and Interior Concept

Structure · Spatial logic · Wayfinding

A specialism within environment work, focused on buildings and interior spaces as designed structures rather than as backdrops. Covers architectural style, structural plausibility, interior layout, and how a space would actually be used by the people who live in it.

Increasingly relevant because level designers need spaces that function for gameplay, meaning the concept has to account for circulation, sightlines, and player navigation, not only how the space looks.

Critical skill: architectural fundamentals and spatial reasoning. Background in architecture transfers unusually well.

UI and Iconography Concept

Interface · Icons · Diegetic design

The visual language of menus, HUDs, icons, and interface elements. Frequently overlooked in lists of concept art types despite being a real specialism with dedicated roles at most mid-size and large studios.

The work sits between art and UX: an icon has to be readable at small scale, consistent with the game’s visual world, and instantly understandable. Diegetic interfaces, where UI is built into the fiction, push this further into environment and prop territory.

Critical skill: graphic design fundamentals, clarity at scale, and genuine interest in usability.

Materials and Surfacing Concept

Texture · Wear · Material identity

The least discussed of the subject types, and a real one. Defines how surfaces should look and behave across a project: which metals, fabrics, stone, and organic materials appear, how they weather, and how wear tells the story of a place.

Often delivered as material studies and callout sheets that texture artists work from, ensuring visual consistency across assets made by different people.

Critical skill: observation of how real materials age and catch light.

Key Art and Promotional Illustration

Composition · Polish · Emotional impact

Concept illustration rather than concept design. Cover art, splash screens, marketing images, storefront assets, and cinematic key visuals. This is the work that represents the game publicly, and it’s judged on composition, rendering quality, and emotional pull rather than on whether production can build from it.

A distinct career path with its own hiring pipeline, often overlapping with freelance and agency work as well as in-house roles.

Critical skill: composition and finished rendering at a high level of polish.

Storyboards, Layout and Previs

Staging · Camera · Sequence

Planning how scenes and cinematics unfold: shot composition, camera placement, staging, and pacing across a sequence. More common on narrative-heavy and cinematic titles, and closely related to the same discipline in film.

Requires thinking in time rather than in single images, which is a genuinely different skill from the other subject types here.

Critical skill: cinematography and visual storytelling across a sequence.