''In my professional career i never failed an art test and i did art tests for hangar 13 and CDprojekt RED, i also was responsible on creating lighting art tests and feedback them, this studio took my one week work and threw it into the garbage right away. '' I was given a brief one sentence guideline in order to do the lighting art test, it was about showing two times of day and to make it optimized, i was also given an extremely un-optimized full level taken from the game itself. Given that they did not gave me more directives i approached this as a Look-dev test (i didn't want to work on the full level in too much detail because i don't work for free and i feared that they would just take my work and deny me employement so at least they had one level ready, i've saw companies do that in the past), so basically i worked for one full week everytime after work to give a direction on the look, mainly using natural light when possible and faking as less as possible so the picture would have a more natural look but still doing extensive use of baked lighting to not make the level too dark in main areas, i added artificial lights during the night version, i also optimized myself most of the assets i was given to at least have decent performance and UV, i solved an obscure issue they had with blueprints that was deleting lighting bakes just after you reloaded the level and i added an extensive note ''changelog'' on what i basically did in the art test both artistically and technically, i did succeed in optimizing the level and they're assets, i had troubles with occlusion culling but i did not had time to solve it at the end, it was not important for the sake of the test, only the variant of it that was tanking the FPS while looking in one direction was fixed as it was major. I also went out of my way to make a Unreal engine 5 version (they use the 4) to demonstrate how natural light can be prettier with less faking efforts. They would reply to me one or two days after saying they are looking for a more senior candidate, i was appalled, not even a feedback after all that work, i requested then a feedback on the work and they basically told me that i failed the art test and that the lighting was too cinematic focused and that i had to fill every dark space with fake lighting and that the level was not game ready comprised with all the necessary artificial lights in the correct spots for gameplay and that i did not created a story for the level. The truth is i never intentioned to create a ''story'' you did not gave me motive nor any type of direction the level should have, and of course i was not going to make the level an ambient light festival because that would be extremely unrealistic and ugly looking, on top of that i was never going to make the level fully equipped for gameplay because as i said i don't work for free and that should be the focus in case i would join the company, working with designers and environment artists to make it adapt to the game itself, they also said that i should have used some references which i did, taking a lot of references from both Mafia Definitive edition and Siege i got very close to the same look using a lot of natural light and baked GI too but appareantly my work was trown into the bin with such disrespect that i've never experienced in my professional career after i nailed all my art tests (especially the ones at Hangar 13 and CD projekt RED), this studio lacks respect for professionals and i'm actually glad i won't have to work with them, extremely negative outlook.