Since 2021, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences has partnered with iam8bit and Fortyseven Communications to produce Game Maker’s Sketchbook, an annual competition celebrating the brightest artistic minds in the games industry.
This year’s Game Maker’s Sketchbook winners have just been announced, including some pretty incredible works from games like Marvel Rivals, The Midnight Walk, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, among others. Winning submissions are broken up into categories focused on a variety of different skillsets, such as character art, environmental design, and iconography (for those HUD elements and inventory boxes that are just too good to ignore), to name a few.
The end-product that we see in games gets the lion’s share of attention, with a focus on incredible character models and 3D environments. And yet, it’s important to remember that almost all games have to start in a much more simple place, with just a few sketches of an idea. Despite the mastery at work here, these sketches often don’t get the attention they deserve, so it’s pretty great to see the competition shining a bit of a light on it.