Arbiter - Monthly Recap - May 2023 (Patreon)

Y'know what's crazy? I think we're in what might be one of the greatest years for video games literally ever. The last year I can think of that was this crazy would have to be 2017 with BotW, P5, Nier, etc. But now we've got Hi-Fi Rush, TotK, FF16, Jedi Survivor, Diablo 4, SF6, MK1, Tekken 8—ALL IN ONE YEAR?? I'M STILL SITTING HERE HELPING ADDISON FIX HIS GOD DAMN 12731827312ND SIGN AND FF16 IS THREE WEEKS AWAY! IT JUST DOESN'T STOP!!!

But it's a humbling yet inspirational time to be a game dev, so I can't complain :)

Anyways, this was a surprisingly busy month! I didn't get quite as much done as I wanted, but I still got to make some cool stuff here and there. I think the forced break was actually pretty good for me though, as it gave me some time to take a step back and reassess my process on a lot of stuff moving forward.

Cooking Crystals

One of the main things I worked on this month was energy crystals. They're pretty prevalent throughout the game's world, so I wanted to improve their shaders/models to match the new environments. These are basically used to replenish resources, reinforce mechanics, and block your path in certain areas. Basically, they were made to be broken.

I started with a simple shader just to establish their new look. The main goals were to clearly convey their phase (color), give them an spiritual and almost mysterious vibe, keep them decently efficient, and make sure they actually look like crystals of course. I'll likely be iterating a bit, but for the most part I'm pretty satisfied.

Once I was happy with their look, I sculpted some different models in Zbrush, baked the maps, and got them in-game. All in all the process was surprisingly straightforward—refreshingly so, I'd say. I still want to add some VFX on top, but otherwise I definitely feel like I can move on for now.

After that was when I got really busy with life stuff. I worked on the environments a bit more, but mostly just in terms of studying and iterating to improve the aesthetic. At one point I disabled all lighting in the scene and recolored almost all of the environment textures just to make sure they looked good before I started worrying about lighting (big lesson there, honestly). 

Still, I have admittedly reached a bit of a wall when it comes to making the environments look good. I've definitely seen some linear improvement in terms of their quality, but not enough to say I'm satisfied with where they are. I think I'm pretty good once I know what I'm making, but the decision making process of deciding which ideas to pursue, what looks best, etc. when it comes to art has always been my biggest struggle. With that, I've decided to compromise!

Delegation

I'm probably going to hire an environment concept artist. I think having a skilled artist take my ideas and mold them into something I can use as a direct guide to build the levels from will remove a lot of the guesswork from the process and allow me to just make levels. It's funny because I've always done this by default for character concept art, but for the environments I've always tried to skirt by on my own. Well no more! I think it's time to exercise some humility and prioritize, y'know, finishing the damn game.

So that's what I'm going to do! I've had several artists in mind for a while now and I've already reached out to one of them, so I'm excited to see where things go. Thankfully a lot of the game's world and art direction is already established, so it really will just come down to conveying that information to whoever I end up working with. Once I have some concepts to work from, I suspect that a lot of the environmental art process will start speeding up tremendously. No more choice paralysis, yippee!!

With all of that said, I'll be putting the environments on the backburner for the time being. I feel like I have a really solid understanding of the environmental art pipeline at this point, so now it just comes down to making something that looks good. I'm going to wait to get some concept art done before I go any further though, so as to not waste any more time needlessly iterating. 

Pivoting to UI

In the meantime, I've decided to start working on UI! Thankfully UI is something I'm much more comfortable with and have already been iterating on, so I'm excited to show all that off once I get it in-game. The UI considerations are a lot weirder because I'm less focused on how to make it look good, and more how to give it a unique sense of style without pulling too hard from my inspirations. It's a tough thing to balance but we're getting there!

Hopefully I'll have more to show on that front next month, but for now I'm just gonna be spending my time iterating on UI until I'm satisfied. I also have a bunch of documentation and references to prepare for the new concept artist, on top of ANOTHER rough month in June, so suffice it to say we're keeping busy. I feel pretty good about where things are heading though! In a few months time, this could actually start looking like a proper vertical slice or something. Crazy!

Anyways, thanks for your support and take care everyone!

Cheers,
Jordy