Making Things Difficult For Myself (or Game Art is Hard).

I’m no stranger to game development, having dabbled in it when I was at University. It was by far my favourite course as whilst I had a decent amount of programming knowledge translating that into creating something playable seemed like a monumental step that required a whole lot of knowledge I simply did not have. This was long before the time when tools like Unity or GameMaker were considered viable and our lecturer made everything easy for us by providing a simple framework on top of DirectX, allowing us to create simple 2D games without having to learn the notoriously complicated API. Since then I’ve tried my hand at Unity several times over and whilst it seems like a programmer’s dream there’s always one place I come unstuck on: the art.

This isn’t exactly an unknown issue to me, all my university projects used sprites that were pilfered from various free game resource sites and anything extra was little more than primitive 3D objects whipped up in 3D Studio Max. For my current project however I had the bright idea to try and generate some terrain using one of those fancy bits of software that seem to make good looking landscapes without too much hassle. After wandering through a sea of options I found Bryce seemed to be the one to go for and, better yet, it had the ability to export all the mesh so I could import it directly into Unity without too many hassles. For the $20 asking price I figured it’d be worth it to get me going and hey, should I want to go full procedural down the line it’d be a good introduction into the things I’d need to consider.

Oh how naive I was back then…

Whilst Bryce is everything it claims to be (and the tutorials on using it are really quite good) I just couldn’t seem to get it to create the type of scenery I had in my head. This is entirely a user based problem, one that I’ve suffered with for a long time where the interconnects between my brain and the tools I’m using to create just don’t seem to be able to gel well enough to produce the results I’m looking for. Whilst I was able to generate a decent looking mesh and import it into Unity it was nothing like I wanted it to be and, after sinking a couple hours into it, I decided that it was best left to one side lest I uninstall everything in frustration.

Realistically though the problem was one of expectations where the disjoint between my abilities with a program I had never used before and my expectations of what I’d produce were completely out of alignment. After mulling it over for the past couple days I’ve come to realise that I had set the bar way too high for what I wanted to create and indeed creating such things at this stage of development is actually a distraction from the larger goals I’m trying to achieve. I’ve since settled on just making do with a flat plane for now (as that’s all I’ll really need for the foreseeable future) or, should I really want to put something pretty in there, I’ll just lift a 3D model from a game that’s close enough so I’ve got something to work with.

You’d think after churning through project after project I would’ve become adept at recognising when I was pursuing something that was antithetical to making actual progress but it seems even after so many years I still find myself making things far more difficult than they need to be. What I really need to do is focus on the parts where I can make good progress and, should I make enough in those areas, then look towards doing the parts that are outside my area of expertise. Of course the best solution would be to partner with a 3D artist, but I’d rather wait until I’ve got something substantial working before I try and sell someone else on my idea.

That is unless you’re one and you’ve got nothing better to do with your time 😉