Arbiter - Monthly Recap - March 2023 (Patreon)

What's up fellow citizens! It's once again tax season which means, as usual, I send my accountant a nice little email with all of my expenses and deductibles for the previous year. But there's another layer to these little "chats" we have.

Do you know how hard it is to sound authentic? It's really hard! That's why I use exclamation points and make stupid jokes at the start of these posts! Being professional? Considerate?? KIND?!? Ew! But my accountant... He does it naturally. 

His prose evokes the delicate care of only the most mindful, benevolent saints blessed upon this world. A true angel for all of mankind. I try to match the angelic omnipotence of his words, but year after year I am outclassed, outdone—outmatched. 

This year was no different, and I suffered yet another loss in this unwinnable war of righteous professionalism. For me, it was an uphill battle of neverending inner turmoil. For him, it was Tuesday.

Please look forward to the next chapter of this chronicle in April 2024.

Art Direction

Anyways, I spent the month, you guessed it, working on environments! Yippie! I am having so much fun! Heck yeah! 

This was kind of a technical month, though I did do a bit of asset production as well. I started talking to my lovely art lead @gravitydusty to get a better idea of colour/shape theory and the different directions we could go for the level. Apparently getting advice from your peers is super useful! Who knew!

Because of that advice, I have spent a lot of time this month messing around with colours and shape. It was frustrating though because I found that I simply wasn't able to get the colours I wanted out of my materials, and I wasn't really sure why. As it turns out, the answer ended up being a lot simpler than I thought! I'm just dumb!

Originally, I was doing a lot of complicated things with my shaders to adjust colours in the editor rather than through textures. I originally did this for the faster iteration times, but the further I went, the less control I actually had. 

Eventually, I had a revelation! Why am I sitting here messing around with my shaders and lighting and post-processing effects when I can just... use textures? I can just... use PBR lighting models? I can just... make my life infinitely easier? So that's what I did!

You can basically just think of this as me simplifying the game's lighting. The result doesn't look horribly different, but it keeps the entire scene much more in sync lighting-wise than it was before. I felt like I was messing with objects at a per-material level to get the look I wanted, whereas now, the lighting and textures do most of the work for me, and the shaders/materials are a lot simpler to work with.

This was especially true for the foliage as it never quite matched the ground how I wanted. But now, I'd dare to say it actually looks kinda nice! I might eventually add pigment maps to help blend the grass further, and I wanna brighten the foliage up a bit in those darker areas too. But as far as lighting is concerned, I think we're almost there!

Life Lessons

After that little win, I've gone back to asset production. I had to remake some of my textures with the shader overhaul, but I also got to make some new foliage and cliff faces. I'm actually pretty happy with the foliage! But I am still gonna go back one last time to fix up my trees and make the giant roots a little more interesting.

As for the cliffs, I haven't really been happy with them visually or technically, so I spent some time trying some different methods out. I'm pretty close to settling on a simpler solution where I just blend different cliff meshes into deformed terrain, and while it's not perfect, it's by far the easiest method and visually it more or less does the job. Hopefully I can get the trees to a similar state. 🤡

A lesson I'm learning over and over again with this stuff (and life in general) is that, most of the time, it's usually not that deep. Some of you may be familiar with the concept of Occam's Razor, which more or less boils down to the idea that "the easy answer is usually the correct one," and I've found that to be consistent with this environmental stuff too. 

Oftentimes I'm finding that the more I stop trying to impose my ego and overcomplicate what I'm doing, the more satisfied I am with my work. "Be like water" and all that. So many of the games I study have such simple solutions to how they build their environments, and even then, a lot of their solutions end up differing based on their needs. I'm still largely making Arbiter by myself, so it's not worth it for me to spend weeks trying to make these really fancy trees/cliffs when they represent probably under 1% of my entire game. Most players will barely notice anyways! 

Arby's environments are ultimately a tool to facilitate combat and exploration. I'm not saying I won't invest in making them look good too (obviously I'm trying) but I guess I'm just kinda strengthening my resolve so I don't get caught in those development traps where I spend 2 weeks trying to do something in an overcomplicated way. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but I'm gonna try to be a bit more proactive about that sort of thing moving forward.

Conclusion

All in all, I'm feeling pretty good this month! I've got some other life bullshit going on that's been a bit of a stressor, but otherwise I don't feel as "lost" as I did earlier on with the environments. I feel like I have much more direction now and my refined approach to solving these problems is helping keep things a lot more doable. Let's hope it sticks! 

I do think I might start trickling in some gameplay work here and there. I just miss it honestly, and the more I run around these environments, the more those issues I've wanted to fix for years start to bother me. Since I'm feeling better about the environments though, I might also take some time to make a new area for combat videos. No more infinite checker void! Yippie!

Anyways, thanks again everyone! See ya in a month!

Cheers,
Jordy