TheXPerts: Meet Mark Cordell Holmes

Welcome to our Member Spotlight at TheXPlace, featuring a unique twist: a self-interview with one of our most esteemed professional members, Mark Holmes. This edition provides an intimate, in-depth look at Mark's journey, narrated in his own words, offering a personal perspective on his remarkable career in the game dev industry.

📜 Bio

As a 30-year visual artist, designer, art director, and creative director, I spent half my career in the Pixar art department, where I contributed to nearly a dozen features, and spent the other half of my career in gaming and tech working across a wide range of media and platforms for such companies as Google, Facebook, Electronic Arts, and many others. In addition to being a fiction writer, teacher, and lecturer, my last role was at Maxis as a Narrative Designer on an ambitious next-gen project. I am currently teaching my online Cinematic Design Thinking course and slowly working my way towards building another startup.

🌟 Proudest Moment

I have had many proud moments across my career. Still, one of the standouts was making the leap back into games after 16 years at Pixar to help found a small San Francisco game development studio called Dynamighty. As studio Co-Creative Director and Art Director, our mobile/console game CounterSpy earned a prize or two, including a Bafta nomination. Being a part of that passionate, talented, and dedicated dev team was a real privilege and learning experience for me.

💪 Secret Weapon

I don't have a specific go-to, but a big part of my process is doing research and gathering references, so I'll often hit Wikipedia, Pinterest, Google, and, more recently, Claude or ChatGPT.

🔎 Background and Role

My current role is as an independent creative director prototyping product concepts for a potential startup while launching my online course and juggling freelance work. I just kind of naturally arrived here by virtue of the dramatic changes disrupting all the creative industries (film, vfx, animation, gaming, tech), perfectly intersecting with where I am in my professional and personal life. Having had a rich and varied career working for others, I can now take on more risk and leverage the equity I've created in myself and my network to pursue something more interesting, unique and meaningful to me.

🪄 Creative Process

Reference and research as listed above. Personally, I need to find something in the product or experience I can be excited about. If it is not meaningful to me in some small way, or if I can't understand or relate to what the audience wants, I have a hard time giving my all. I like to get fresh takes on the work from different perspectives to challenge or validate assumptions.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Team Dynamics

I've worked with superiors, peers and subordinates in every discipline, and I have found it generally true that being curious, supportive, sympathetic, collaborative, open and honest fosters healthy understanding and trust, which are critical to any successful collaboration. Making games is a team sport, and everyone plays a different role with a different personality, communication style, and perspective that all takes time to learn. I try to maintain the big picture, that we are all ultimately working towards the same goal of putting out a successful product--and even more fundamentally, that we are all imperfect human beings trying to be successful in our own lives and work. My goal has been to align as many of these threads as possible.

🧰 Technology and Tools

Nowadays I am removed enough from the trenches, with most of my tools serving in my ability to craft, communicate and maintain a vision to others. This can range from documentation, style guides, 2d & 3d concepting, pre-visualization, paper prototyping, Miro boards, and so on.ns.

💡 Advice for Aspiring Professionals

Strong foundations and fundamentals make you competitive. The tools, software and hardware are always changing (even faster now because of AI) and are only as effective as the user behind them. Be an artist (master of your discipline), not just a tool-user. These days, breaking into the creative fields is particularly tough. Things are changing quickly everywhere. Look at this disruption as a leveling of the playing field and seek out opportunities in the innovation spaces. Don't look at the ball where it is now, but where you think it is going. Take on risks, try new things, be open-minded. Be persistent, and positive. Lean into your network and community.

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