October 2014
October 11, 2014
GAME DEVELOPMENT AS EXORCISM
“Do what you love” is a ridiculous epithet when it comes to solo game development. There will be many, many long months of doing things you absolutely hate in order to produce something you can love. Game development as a journey of self-discovery is a horrible nightmare that feels like it will never end. It is far better to treat it as a penance that must be paid in order to find redemption.
When I was a kid I took a lot of drugs. What I was really doing was self-medicating in search of certain realities of self that were slowly revealed to me through reckless experimentation and introspective observation. When I came out the other side, changed though I was, I believed I’d learned the lessons I’d needed to learn. For a good number of years it seemed I had, then I found myself possessed with a wild desire to produce videogames.
Now, 5 years deep in the actual art of game development I realize that I’m still self-medicating, only this time my drug is in the punishing form of self-inflicted software bugs and artistic concepts that refuse to realize themselves because I lack the skill or the technology. Whether this is karma, or I’m still digging a hole into my heart to find out what really lies beneath, I can say that it’s just as painful as waking up after a drug overdose used to be.
Don’t do what you love. Do whatever’s necessary to exorcise the unfathomable horror of being and get back into the business of living free.
October 24, 2014
Month 49 Report
It’s time to start talking about development. Let’s keep it short, simple, & heavy on the pictures.
DEVELOPMENT SNAPSHOT
The white/greybox is part of the prototype stage of videogame development. It allows for collision and scripting tests, scaling of objects, and other visual tuning like shading and lighting. In artistic terms it’s known as “blocking out” and provides a foundation for future levels of detail. The overall game system should work at this level of fidelity before enhancing objects or adding sound design.
The image above represents 4 months of planning and 2 months of production (solo, full-time, all assets from scratch).
FROM MESH TO MAPPED
It’s a 1-time fixed cost (\$6563 USD) to produce physically-based rendering assets for the current project. The Child uses Alloy for shading in Unity, as there are no plans to update to Unity v.5.
As a solo developer relying on self-instruction it’s taken roughly 36 months to put this pipeline together & get it to the point where it’s fast and produces assets of acceptable quality.
There’s still room for improvement in regards to animation output, but it will still be months or upwards of a year before that really matters.
HOW TO SURVIVE
Months of anonymous assault on certain high-profile individuals seem to be trying to teach us an important lesson: put the work before the ego.
Why do people feel it’s so critical to put their personal lives in front of their work? Particularly in a field like ours, that of digital authorship, where we can remain anonymous ourselves, shielded by pen names and aliases forever while still disseminating our work with the exact same reach of those who choose to reveal themselves?
I’m not innocent in this regard, after all I spent the first few years of my independent career feeling insecure and underloved as I tried to push my persona alongside my work. But now it looks like it’s in my best interests to fade back into the shadows and let the work speak for itself. And shouldn’t that be the way it is?
It’s a good practice to take a long look at the behavior of anyone victimized by a random internet hate mob. Take a good look at how much gasoline they pour on the fires at their own feet. I guarantee (providing the victims haven’t gone to great lengths to cleanse their contributions from their timelines) you’ll find that they’re the ones most antagonizing the mobs and whipping them into frenzies. No one is really innocent in these exchanges, yet it always seems to start with an artist putting their ego before the art, rather than allowing the work to speak for itself.
It’s unfortunate that people have had to get hurt for this realization to come about, but now that it’s clear it’s going to be very hard to feel sympathetic for anyone who comes forward with a “me first, my politics, my agendas, look at who I am” approach rather than a “here is the art, here is the message, make up your own mind”.
Game developers are not rock stars or stage performers. Who we are is irrelevant to the presentation of our work. Perhaps there’s a case made for motivating others by setting a good example, but doesn’t it follow that setting one untainted by racial, sexual, or other politics is purer?
An artist who chooses to pursue personal fame has to learn to avoid antagonizing any mobs that might form. It’s important to step back and think critically by looking at the lives of the celebrities who’ve come before, and how they’ve dealt with the masses. It’s more important to really question why it’s so important that a name, face, and political agendas are attached to the work. Inevitably the answer to that question is ego, hubris, and pride, and those qualities are far more toxic and self-destructive than any death threat.
Until the Internet is stripped of its anonymous functionality we will forever be outgunned when agitating the public. The only way to “win” a war of hateful attrition is to not participate. Make it about the art, not the artist. Artists come and go, we are only mortal after all, but our creations have the potential for immortality. The only people standing in the way of that are ourselves.
JUST WRITE
Unsurprisingly, 6 months of sustained and daily practice produces solid results. I’ll be participating in this year’s National Novel Writer’s Month. If you’re doing the same feel free to connect and best of luck.
See you in 30 days for the 50th monthly update! Thanks for following, your patience is appreciated.
2014.10.01 – 2014.10.31