Vladimir Mokry, Sr Concept Artist, AD & Instructor: Why Game Sketches Act as Wireframes and Most Concepts End Up in the Bin

Vladimir Mokry started out as an art teacher, spent years as a UX lead and startup co-founder in Czechia, and at 30 packed his bags for Montreal to study concept art. Since then he's worked on Apex Legends, Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Call of Duty: Vanguard, and today he's building the world of Werewolf: The Apocalypse – Rageborn at creā-ture Studios. His core belief: concept art delivers function first. Before he cares how a bridge looks, he wants to know how it lifts, where the counterweights go and how the player gets across.

We talk about what a concept artist actually does, and why the job is closer to UX than to graphic design: his sketches work like wireframes, made to find the right direction rather than to end up in the game. Vladimir walks us through the difference between a AAA production and a small studio. On Apex Legends, around seven environment concept artists dressed up gray-box blockouts on a strict brief. At creā-ture, he's one of just two concept artists. The whole team sees his work early, and he can still ask "Can we change this?" and help shape the game itself. Along the way: why most concepts are designed to be thrown away, why games don't chase the simplest solution the way UX does, and what it took to unlearn Czech directness in North America.

Then there's AI. Vladimir experiments with it a lot. When he let Claude fill a forest with trees in Blender, it did a decent job, but it took four minutes, and he knew he could do it faster by hand. AI does well with things it has seen many times, like a generic barbarian with an axe. But when you want something truly new, it still needs artists to come up with it first.

This conversation is really about why design starts with function, not looks, and why, in a world where anyone can build a game over the weekend, strong ideas and human-made work might become the premium product. It costs more, but it tastes better.