A former New Yorker, now in the Midwest - raising 2 boys and trying to break into game / VR development before I get too old and curmudgeonly to care about anything other than where my cane is...
So, in the few moments I get here and there, I try and read what I can; usually in the pickup line at kiddo’s school.
Lately, I’ve been deepdiving into UX / UI – while I ‘can’ do graphic design, I’m much more of a get the idea out and its done. It also feels like the biggest weakness because it usually has no pizzazz or style.
Old, boring UI
In my random bits of knowledge – I kept feeling like my mobile game just wasn’t good enough – it was distracting me. And it didn’t help that my neighbor’s little boy had a bit of trouble figuring out the gameplay. That smacks of poor design.
So – back to the sketchbook. Or sketchbooks, as it were.
My little art director has filled dozens of 18″x24″ newsprint pads, and still draws a lot to this day. So I dove into them, looking for anything that might be a better fit than the clock I had been using.
My lil art director thinks of everything
A slider bar! That is a lot easier to read – and I could put it right under Booper, so the player wouldn’t have to take their eyes off the action! Plus it frames the player and the play area nicely, and I could move the completed word counter right underneath the letter boxes. Much neater!
So. Much. Better.
I might just be getting the hang of this dev stuff.
or: How AI failed me, but Unity came shining through.
Coming from a art back ground, I get the odd commission here and there – it helps buy things for my game dev journey.
My mother-in-law came to me with a request: she had a dream about a cabin on the beach, it was very peaceful and relaxing; and she’d very much like it if I painted it for her.
Being eager to try AI art generation, I sat down with her and had her describe as much as she could in exacting detail. And we spent the better part of an afternoon feeding prompts into my local install of Automatic 1111 and seeing what it would spit out.
She ‘liked’ what she saw, but felt it was ‘too resort-like’ and ‘too plastic-y’; not keeping with the humble esthetic she’d dreamed about. After a few more tries with negative prompts, we had to call it quits to feed kiddos and take a break from her growing frustration with the process.
About a week later, she texted me- excited she had found a photo in the paper that was more true to the dream and brought it to the next family gathering:
It was small, and printed in that obnoxious half-tone process newspapers use, which made it low resolution. And very grainy.
So- hello Google Reverse image search. Found a better version and started Photoshopping things with a renewed energy. Found different images that she liked and started editing them together. Added filters and adjustment layers, tweaking things left and right.
And she still wasn’t thrilled with the result:
I think this was the best version done on Photoshop
What it boiled down to was this: the cabin image was just too flat and two dimensional to really get the ‘look’ she was after. Since it was too flat – I felt I must make it 3D.
round and round we go
Taking a cue from Ian Hubert’s Lazy Tutorials – I took the photos I found and began modeling. The tut in reference is:
its only a minute and SO worth the watch!
So after some tinkering, I got the cabin in Unity and sat down with Ma to sculpt out the terrain, adding a few free assets, such as rocks, along the way. She was super impressed with how quickly we could iterate changes, move things around and tinker with the various settings to make it look ‘right’.
After tinkering, I got my model in Unity!
Once we got it looking the way she wanted, I started showing off, adding wind effects to the trees, I cribbed some seagull sounds off some video I filmed at the beach last year and looped some surf sounds as well. Once she liked the look of everything, I took a screenshot of it and said, “Ok, this is what I’ll use for the reference for your painting!”
hopefully I can paint something good enough to match this!
Suffice to say – this was the most involved project I’ve ever attempted for a painting – usually its sitting the subject with some lights and taking a few dozen photos until I get the mood and feeling I’m looking for. Having tried 3 vastly different approaches, I’m thrilled that I have so many tools at my disposal in order to create. At the same time, tis also daunting, far better artists than I have been silenced by the sheer scope and volume of what they can create with…
Post Script:
So my initial attempt at painting it didn’t work out quite as planned. In my race to get the final underway, I grabbed a non-permanent ink and it bled like crazy as I was putting down my first washes.
looks like I’ll be doing this again
I did go back and try to mitigate some of the bleeding – but it looks like I’ll have to take another run at it.
After a very rough holiday season, I’m finally back to a place of dev.
Back on Nov. 1st, my wife had the honor of being laid off from the same job that laid me off back in 2006, via a conference call, and right before the holiday season. To her credit, instead of spending a month of depressive TV watching and sleeping, she dove right into job hunting and (luckily) found a job doing the same thing, and for the same pay.
Its mine all mine, once more!
Which means that for the FIRST TIME in over 2 years and 10 months, I am alone in the house, not tending to kids (who went back to school this week) not playing tech for a person on each floor of the house who needs to access work or school, not providing snack, meals, beverages or clean up duty to said people on each floor. I can just sit. And work.
Except for this fuzzball, who senses the house is empty and is clinging to me as if I were the last chopper out of Saigon.
It is a bit daunting, now I have zero excuse – time to finish the GDD, publish the mobile game and get seriously working on the game – before May sneaks up on me and I’m stuck with two kiddos once again.
I do have ONE resolution this year – I want to show my game a either Games4Change’s XR 4 Change expo, or perhaps the Interactive pavilion at Tribeca; either way – its been too long since I’ve been home and I long to roam the streets of NYC, see friends I haven’t seen in years and visit some fave watering holes – plus suck up a ton of reference photos for painting my city grungy paintings.
I’ve hated it since it debuted in ’94 and them roommates and I were dirt poor, living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and it took TWO subway rides to get anywhere. The roomies and I would lambast the show for its sheer ‘un-New York-ness’. No one we knew had giant apartments like that. There were no strikingly attractive people living across the hall from us. Our ‘wacky adventures’ were rollerblading the city streets looking for the cheapest food and ale we could find.
But I can’t get that damn theme song out of my head.
2nd gear. Stuck. Summer break with 2 kids who are bored. Family vacations stuck in the car driving for hours. Summer camps (special needs for lil’ Art Director and chess camp for Jr. lil’ Art Director). Playdates with other kids. And I truly believe Sartre is being misquoted when he said ‘Hell is other people’ – I think he mean to say ‘Hell is other people’s kids’ – either I have some sort of ‘vibe’ kids pick up on, or there is a serious parenting crisis in the country; but it seems that if I show even the slightest interest / interaction with anyone my kids are playing with, they instantly glom on to me and demand my attention. Its almost as if they’re neglected by every single adult in their lives and they are starved for grown up attention.
Rant over. Seeing that I haven’t written since April- I can totally relate to the whole ‘stuck in 2nd gear’ motif. Even though things HAVE been moving forward.
I’ve been slowly plugging away at the mobile game – and despite the struggles of adding the Curved World effect that it seems is necessary for all infinite runners these days, its getting closer to release. The biggest issue, of course, is the impostor syndrome nagging of ‘is it any good?’ Which I’m sure will plague me 10 years down the road after the internet has shredded it, mocked me into a cave-living hermit.
I’ve been playing around with AI stuff as well – I tried plugging my game into Midjourney, and this is what was spat out – and I kinda like it as a starting point, so it might become the logo for the mobile game. After some edits. Painting it from scratch. Adding my kid’s handwritten font. Redoing it again cause I don’t like it. BUT – I do see the potential for faster iterating of ideas, maybe not the actual art creation, but just quickly throwing out stuff to see what get the creative juices flowing.
intern work!
Lastly – I got an intern! A fellow Oculus Launch Pad dev (who also happens to be a new media professor at a nearby college) approached me with a student who wants to learn VR dev and I have to say; as SOON as I get a dime of funding, I’m hiring this guy. Its been so long since I’ve done any collaborative work with someone else, that I had forgotten that people can bring a whole different kind of creativity to the table. The animation above really drove that point home. I would have given this character a skootchy, wiggly type of dragging on the ground movement, but instead my intern gave it this vertical, bounciness that I totally adore. Having a different viewpoint can be completely eye-opening.
Keep your eyes peeled – crowdfunding is coming soon!
