#15: The Development of Development
“Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.”
Project update
For the first week of 2024, I actually mostly took a week off of my project. After working on it for more or less for 6 months straight, I needed a week to myself. Well, almost… I needed a day off work because I woke up feeling like my joints were trying to tapdance out of their fleshy prison by means of a grim fandango, but it thankfully only lasted a day and wasn’t an indication of COVID coming to throttle me.
Hey! I’m going to UnrealFest 2024! This is a 2-day convention put on by Epic Games, the makers of the Unreal Engine, which I plan to build my videogame in. If you’re going, hit me up, let’s chat! I’m really excited to go, because I’m keen to throw myself in the deep end, as I usually do, make friends, shake hands, swap business cards (which I have just ordered to be printed, woo hoo), and make new connections. I’m excited not just to learn new skills, but to try and build bridges that will work to serve the communities both of myself and the people I meet. I am here to make videogames that tell stories for the public good, after all.
Speaking of which, I have now settled on a name for my game, and over the next month or two I will be creating some cool unveiling assets (I hope!) as well as a secondary website to host the game itself. I hope you love it, because I do - it has a beautiful colour palette, and I landed on a logo that is purely typeface. I spent a long time poring through hundreds of iterations and permutations, and ultimately the evocative and powerful style that I want only seemed possible with the right text, and nothing at all to distract from it. I hope you agree when I share it with you!
Textbook learnings
So, I took a week off. Or did I? I spent every spare moment with my nose in my Unreal textbook, and I’ve churned through about 240 pages of material in the last week. What that amounts to is having built most of another small videogame in around a week. Cool! Granted, it’s a first-person shooter, which I don’t really have an interest in playing anymore, and so no real interest in developing them, either. However, the core skillset of making a shooter, as a game, shares 3/4ths the same underlying skillset as other genres.
Making this small game has the added benefit that I can adjust it to demonstrate programming competencies at school. In addition to that, I will be able to use it as evidence of my technical ability to make games when it comes around to my grant applications, and further, is in the engine I intend to make my own game in. So… did I take a week off? Not really, I just didn’t write dialogue.
I will somehow share this first-person shooter in the next few weeks, and it won’t cost you any money to play. It won’t be gratuitously violent either, if that’s not your thing, it’s really just a technological demo.
Personal reflections - Art
At the moment I’m trying to reach out to artists to create both character and environmental concepts for me, and it has me thinking a great deal. I have valued money since my very earliest memories, not out of sheer mercantilism and the accumulation of treasure, but because in a world dominated by money, it represents freedom. Specifically, the freedom to live a life of dignity and respect, and the minimisation of innumerable stresses. To that end, I never want people to volunteer their time or energy on a project like mine - I want people to be compensated for their time, so naturally, any art that I’m looking for will be paid. That makes it all the more interesting to be an observer of the AI art revolution (or devolution, in the eyes of some).
For me, at this stage of my project, the art is inspiration; the story’s people and places are in draft, whilst conceptually reasonably solid. What that means is that I’m scouring the web for approximations, or even simply mood images, which evoke the feelings and senses I want, and there’s no question that, especially for a project that falls within the surreal, AI generated images are often really very on point. It’s difficult to know how to feel about that, because surreal art by human beings also abounds, and my values tell me that it is infinitely more important to encourage the human artist than the human AI prompt master. I make no apologies for that - AI artwork is definitely art by most metrics that one might choose, I feel like we’re beyond the point of discussing that particular nexus of inflammatory diatribe, but it’s also a categorical fact that (fancy interpolation aside) it’s art that is synthesised from the works of others. There is a non-trivial distinction to be drawn here between works made by humans that are “inspired by”, “in the style of”, etc etc, as opposed to those which are “algorithmically formulated according to” someone else’s work. The first of these is the nurturing of original creativity through the lens of your own experience with regard to the creative output of others. The second is a “what-if” simulation which can create a new work whose bounds and scope exceed what was important to the work it is simulating. Some people don’t think that matters, and sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree, but it is important to note the difference.
In order to understand why this might be a perverse use of art, you need only think of your favourite artist, and then imagine their work being used to render your worst nightmare against both your will, and the will of the artist. This, to me, is the crux of the matter: Control over the artistic integrity of an artist’s work no longer resides with the artist. Their meaning, purpose, vision, clarity, objective, can all be perfectly executed in ways that might not only be artistically apocryphal, but commercially illegal, as well.
That’s enough pontificating for now, I think. Pay your artists.
Games I played
No games again this week, but I WILL be playing some soon, because my first term of the year ends this week, so next week I have 2.5 days to myself! I’m really loving study this year so far, but it’s going to be wonderful to be able to do whatever I want (read: my project) at my own pace.
Extracurricular game dev update
I’ve been getting back into my online course a bit in the last week, which is focusing on game media, journalism, assembling a press kit, and starting to think about accumulating a games journalists list for eventually contacting. This is very interesting stuff, not because it’s complex, but because it’s really good to have marketing expert lay out the basics of, for example, what to put in a press kit. I love lists and forms, so assembling a kit for someone is a pretty fun and exciting little task. Sadly I don’t yet have any imagery, art, graphics or promotional material to go with it, so it won’t really be an effective press kit for quite a while, but I’ll get there.
Love you all.
