Diana Niculescu – Womenize! – Inspiring Stories
Womenize! – Inspiring Stories is our weekly series featuring inspirational individuals from games and tech. For this edition we talked to Diana Niculescu, 3D Generalist at Arcane Cabinet. She speaks about how teamwork, proper scoping, and exploring multiple disciplines, especially 3D art, shaped her path as a generalist, while also emphasizing personal expression as a key driver in her game design work. Read more about Diana here:
Hi Diana! After studying Game Design at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences, you transitioned quite quickly into professional roles as a 3D Generalist. Looking back, what were the most important lessons or experiences during your studies that prepared you for working in a real production environment?
One of the most valuable skills I learned throughout my studies was working in teams. The Game Design department placed a lot of emphasis on group work, making students develop projects together from the start. Back then, being able to collaborate with people with diverse sets of skills felt like a relief, because it made the leap into game design less scary. But the real value of working in teams was learning to keep an open communication with my colleagues, managing tasks in groups, and supporting each other.
Another incredibly valuable skill I learned is how to scope properly. As I developed my skills across various areas of game development (visual scripting, 3D art, and creative direction being some of them), I also became more aware of what I know, what I can learn, the time it takes, and whether it’s achievable within a given time frame.
These two skills go hand in hand with each other, because in a real production environment, it’s important to know which features to prioritize and recognize which go beyond the team’s scope. You do that by being transparent about the limitations you are facing, whether it’s a tight deadline or a skill you haven’t mastered yet. There’s no shame in admitting you don’t know something, because everyone is constantly learning all their lives. It’s wiser to admit when a task is beyond your current skillset, with little time to learn it, instead of committing to a task you can’t deliver, which can cost the whole team. What you don’t know now, you will learn step by step with every project, and eventually you will find it easy and look back and realize how much you’ve grown.
You’ve already worked on modeling, texturing, rigging, and animation for game-ready assets early in your career. How did you discover that becoming a 3D Generalist was the right path for you, and what excites you most about working across multiple disciplines in game development?
When I started my studies, our professors described game design as a triangle, with Design, Code, and Art at its corners. Their goal was for us to achieve a balance across skill sets in each of these disciplines and to understand how they connect, positioning ourselves in the middle of the triangle. That inspired me to explore a wide range of roles, ranging from more technical to more artistic. However, the discipline that really caught my eye was 3D art, for which I began dedicating more of my time and energy in my second semester. I was intrigued by each step of the 3D art pipeline, going down a rabbit hole of tutorials and best practices, working to create past the quality that was expected of us at the time.
In trying to figure out which part of it I like the most, I couldn’t give up on any of the others. While I am aware that learning all at the same time may slow my growth for each part in particular, I simply love the natural progression of going from one step to the next one, instead of repeating the same one all the time. Even though I present myself as a 3D artist, I still like and want to do more than that in game development. For example, I enjoy the miscellaneous tasks I can jump to whenever I feel fatigued from my usual work. They help me clear my mind and return with a fresh perspective to my usual tasks. Not only does working across multiple disciplines feed different parts of my brain, but it also comes with the benefit of understanding how other areas of development work and how they connect with the rest, which improves the quality of my work.
While searching for the right path, I felt discouraged at times about pursuing a generalist role, because I often heard that big companies look for specialized roles instead. While I might face difficulty applying for a job at a AAA company now, my current experience and way of working are instead highly valuable for indie studios. They need people who can take on diverse roles, which is what I like to do. It feels right at this point in my life, while I’m still experimenting with new skills.
What role does personal expression play in your approach to game design, and how does that shape the kinds of experiences you want to create?
I incorporate a part of me in every game I work on, whether it’s a feature I have a particular interest in or a personal experience. Since I like working with diverse artistic directions for every project, it encourages me to experiment with various aesthetics and tools. It’s a great learning opportunity, as I gradually learn new systems with every game I work on. For example, I’m going to finally explore customization in my newest project. It’s one of my favorite features in games, and I’m excited to directly influence how it will turn out and to learn what it takes to implement it.
Besides working on features that I’m passionate about in team projects, I also design personal games based on my own experiences. I like using game design as a means of artistic expression, which is something I discovered towards the end of my university studies. It happened during a course called Game a Week, where we were given a weekly theme to develop small and polished games, alone or in teams. Working alone with tight deadlines enabled me to explore a wide range of artistic directions with ease, as well as deeper, more personal themes. The whole process stimulated my creativity substantially, as I focused on simple yet meaningful designs. I chose small concepts to allow myself to treat all game elements equally, which is what made the final games feel complete, despite the tight deadlines. I enjoyed the balance that process brought to my workflows and how it allowed me to flexibly switch between areas of development as I wanted. Because I enjoyed the creative freedom, playfulness, and cathartic quality of the process, I explored this further in my Bachelor’s. That’s how I discovered that personal games are a growing topic in game studies, with people currently referring to them as “game poems”, which is a term that I really like. They have a tendency to be short and use abstraction to convey the author’s experience, since it has the power to express deeper emotions with less. I also used abstraction to create mechanics that communicated my feelings, the result being a collection of games covering diverse experiences that had one thing in common: they were my experiences. I loved working on these personal projects because I found a great way to express myself, and the whole process proved to be very cathartic. That’s why I encourage everyone to give it a shot and make their own game poem, while giving equal importance to all game elements.