The experience of doing art for a video game from concept through final asset is something I've now done on two shipped indie games, and the pipeline is significantly different from standalone illustration work.

Concept phase: loose and fast. The goal is communicating ideas to the team, not producing beautiful images. I use a rough digital marker aesthetic that conveys color, form, and mood without requiring hours per image. Ten rough concepts in a day is better than one polished concept.

Asset production phase: the technical constraints take over. Texture budgets, polygon counts, the specific limitations of the target engine. Every artistic decision goes through a 'does this work at runtime' filter.

Iteration phase: this is where the concept art skills matter most in unexpected ways. When a character or environment needs to change mid-production, the ability to ideate quickly and evaluate concepts efficiently becomes the bottleneck. The concept artist is a visual problem-solver, not a renderer.

The shipping experience: seeing your concept art running in a playable game is a genuinely strange and satisfying experience. The gap between what you imagined and what shipped is always instructive.