Arbiter - Annual Recap - 2023

HAPPY NEW YEAR GAMERS!!! 🗣

Hope everyone had a good-ass holiday season and didn't snag any pesky viruses along the way! I took a break around Christmas to spend time with family while clearing out a bit of my backlog (BG3 rolled a critical success and Berserk has branded my very soul), but now I'm back to work! Crazy to think we just came out of what is arguably one of the greatest gaming years of all time (layoffs aside of course), but here we are. Hopefully 2024 brings more of the good and less of the bad, but either way I'm sure I'll just be over here bitching about rocks.

Speaking of which...

The Monolith

My goal for this year was environmental art. While I've dabbled in it before, it's definitely something I've largely neglected for the majority of development. Any time I attempted to make environments in the past was usually pretty half-assed and never really took me beyond the block-out stage. It has consistently been a great, unapproachable wall in the middle of my path.

Combat-wise, the game's been in a pretty good state. Throughout production I've tried to prioritize the elements I was confident in (gameplay and animation) while saving the stuff I was less confident in (environments) for later. Now while there will always be more to polish and iterate, I found that after finishing the transformations there really weren't any major gameplay-related tasks left. The last big pillar on that front would be the boss fights, but I'm not too worried about those and I'd rather make them in the context of their environments than abstracted from them. With that, I found myself once again facing the monolithic presence I'd been so desperate to avoid.

...and it sucked. I'm not sure what the future holds, but right now I can pretty confidently say that learning how to make environmental art has without a doubt been the single hardest part of this project thus far. It has been a rollercoaster of little victories on top of some of my absolute lowest lows—a complete 180 from my comfort zone into the darkness of the unknown.

But you can't navigate darkness without light, so my first step was to come to terms with where I was and figure out where I was going. I had to get a better understanding of just how big this monolith was and how I could go about breaking it down.

Finding the Light

Light is fleeting beneath the monolith's shadow. I've picked up a few lessons about environmental art over the years, but I really never had the opportunity to fully dive into it before. Blocking out levels is something I've always somewhat enjoyed, but translating it into performant art that actually looks good was where I always got stuck. As a generalist I typically love learning new skills, but the more artistically demanding aspects have eluded me over the years.

For example, the very first environment for Arbiter was this mountainous level from the 2017 Pre-Alpha Demo. Back then it was an acceptable space I threw together in a few months, but looking back, all I see is... purple. There's some shape language that almost dares to be interesting, but for the most part there's really not much going on and the quality of assets leaves a lot to be desired.

I took another vague attempt in 2019, which was a bit better, but my process was ridiculously unoptimized and the result was still pretty lackluster overall. This is where I started getting heavily into shader programming and making level design tools, but I'd still say it lacks any sort of discernible aesthetic.

2020 saw my last half-assed attempt which is ironically the worst of the three. I'd say in this arc I was more focused on block-out techniques than overall art style, but it's still crazy to me that I once posted this thinking it was acceptable.

I think my fundamental problem with these attempts was largely my ego getting in the way of my growth. The ceiling of quality I could achieve was extremely low because I was making environments within my limitations rather than investing time into improving my fundamentals. My eyes were bigger than my stomach, as it were.

I wouldn't take another crack at it until 2023, but at the very least I knew where to start. One way or another, I had to improve.

My previous attempts were only for a few months each before the anxiety of feeling like I was wasting my time started to sink in. After that point, I'd typically move onto something more within my skillset like combat, animation, or programming. In 2023 however, I committed to fully immersing myself in environmental art until I finally figured it out (at least well enough to make something shippable). While still ugly as sin, the above image kinda represents the start of that process and when I made a point to really sit down and learn this shit.

A rule I like to follow when learning anything is simply this: when you get stuck, study. Best case you find inspiration; worst case you verify what you already know. This is similarly why artists gather references before they get started—they're hunting for anything that kickstarts their inspiration while proactively solving problems before they have them. If they try to draw something they don't intuitively understand or have reference for, it probably won't look very good. If my goal was to make good looking environment art, then I had to do the same.

I've gathered plenty of environment references before, but never with the clear intent I did in 2023. My goal was to fundamentally understand how to make environments look good (and efficiently), so I got references for everything. Some I downloaded, but I also spent quite some time taking literally hundreds of photos from a bunch of different games. If I got stuck, I'd boot something up and "see how they did it" while taking as many specific references as possible.

But it still looked like shit.

I spent a lot of time looking at references and asking "How?" as in "How do they do that? How do they make that tree? How are they rendering those flowers?" etc. What I didn't think to ask until later, was "Why?" I mean, to be fair I asked myself "Why doesn't my art look as good?" but it wasn't until I started asking other artists why they make the choices they do that I started to get what I was missing. Essentially, I was missing intent (and fundamental art skills).

Color. Shape. Contrast. These are things I knew of, but never things I really studied or practiced. Like sure, I knew you wanted to use colours that complimented each other, the symbolism of different shapes, and how to balance values, but I only ever considered the individual trees—never the entire forest. I was making environments—the rocks, the trees, the grass, etc. But I wasn't making environment art, and that was my problem.

Enter my overcorrection arc. This was back around March but I think comparing this image to any of the others above just goes to show how significant that revelation was to me. It was like seeing color for the first time.

It's funny, I had always appreciated beautiful game environments when I saw them, but when it came to making my own, until this point I had never really looked at it as proper "art." That is to say, I wasn't seeing it as a vessel for self-expression nor as an embodiment of artistic fundamentals. I saw it simply as the space where gameplay happens, and never really pushed myself to do anything more with it. When it clicked that I was making art, not just "environments", it became obvious why my levels had looked like shit all these years—I wasn't really trying to say anything with them. I lacked intent.

I had planned for each level to have their own sense of style of course. I always had colour palettes and different forms of environmental storytelling in mind. But I never had an overall homogenous sense of how the levels can use every fundamental aspect of art to convey a feeling or tell a story. I thought of those components individually, but never as a whole. In finally starting to see the bigger picture, it became a lot clearer how these techniques can be used to bring everything together.

Now of course when I realized that, I may have gone a little crazy making everything SUPER vibrant, but more importantly, the intent was starting to shine through. The level was starting to have a sense of style and place as a magical forest, and it was the first time I started to get positive comments on how things were looking, which validated everything I was learning. Yippee! We love positive feedback loops!

Things became a little inconsistent at that point though. I was still trying to balance finding an art style with actually making assets, so I went through a lot of different iterations as I refined my process. I spent a lot of time tweaking colours and experimenting with different shapes for stuff like trees, cliffs, etc. I was in the awkward stage where my skills hadn't caught up to my eyes, so I continued my study > practice loop until I'd hit another wall.

It was around this point that I commissioned a concept artist (the lovely Kat Bartlett) to help define the level's overall visual style. This was a huge help not only because the art was great, but because it also forced me to better understand what my intentions were with the level. Once I had to communicate my goals with another human being, I realized just how messy some of the ideas were, so we refocused on the important elements and tossed away what wasn't working.

During that time, I took a small break from environmental art to work on UI! I was starting to see a lot of diminishing returns, so I spent about 3~ months getting some of the UI concepts in-game.

UI hasn't been too bad implementation-wise. The trickiest part for me is that Arby has a healthy amount of mechanics, a lot of which need UI representation. Balancing that out in a way that's aesthetically pleasing while still following general UI standards was tough, and I'm still iterating on it. For now at least, the HUD's more or less completely functional and does what it has to.

I'm much less farther along on the menus, but I made some good headway this year given where I started. Menus are kinda in the same place as the HUD right now in that they're functional and I don't hate them by any means, but I want to iterate on those designs a bit to really get things as clean as can be.

I'm not sure when I'll get back to UI (probably after this first level's done), but I'll have more to say when I get there so stay tuned!

Once I got back to levels, I tried to slow down and reign in a lot of the more intense colors and values. I got to a pretty okay spot, but I found I was having a really tough time balancing my lights and darks and couldn't really understand why. After doing some digging I painfully learned that my monitor's color settings had been all messed up, and it was really warping my sense of value.

I was pretty frustrated at how long it took me to realize that, but I'm at least glad my eyes caught up enough to be able to tell. Everything on my monitor looks better now, and I wouldn't have even noticed if I didn't take such a deep dive on art in the first place. In fixing these settings however, almost every colour/texture in the scene was off, so I had to spend some time making it all cohesive.

I started working on architecture after this, but it was around this November that something started to click. I started to have less and less indecision and more consistent progress, with less colour tweaking as everything started to look more harmonious. I was gaining momentum and started experimenting with ways I could enhance the overall art style outside of the individual levels until finally, I made something good!

This image is imperfect. I'd still like to make some more flowers, improve the trees, the cliffs, the colours, hell even Ashe himself. But it's the first time I've looked at a single image of the game and thought to myself "Hey, this actually kinda looks like a video game now!"

Unfortunately, an artist's eyes are ever improving, and their work ever unfinished. I'm sure in a few months or years, even this will look like shit to me. But the fulfillment I feel scrolling up this page is the kind of stuff that keeps me motivated. I was so used to feeling inconsistent about my work that it's a bit surreal to finally have some solid ground to stand on. It's not gorgeous or groundbreaking, but compared to where I was, it's good, and that feels pretty neat.

It's so easy to get caught up in how the quality of your work reflects your self-worth, but when you actually have real, tangible growth that you can see for yourself, it makes all that struggle feel like it meant something. It removes where you are from how you've grown, and allows you to appreciate that growth for its own merits—without doubt. Chase that feeling!

The New Year

God that was a long one, sorry about that! I'm still very much improving this first level, iterating on colours and finalizing assets, but I'm in a good place these days. My initial goal for last year was to block-out the entire game, but I decided it'd be better to fully establish my art style with a completed level first, and finish the others in a batch. Considering how much the art style has informed the level design, I think I made the right choice. Hopefully I can wrap this one up in the coming months before cranking out the others, but I'm sure I'll be iterating on it in the future either way. 

But thanks again everyone for your continued support! I understand that I really suck about the exclusive rewards, but I hope you feel that your money's being put to good use regardless. I'm not gonna make any promises for 2024, but I am going to try to be better about it, even if it just amounts to hyper-specific ramblings about nothing or showing off downright ugly parts of the game. Honestly, the only reason I haven't posted more exclusive stuff is simply because I didn't think you guys would find much of it interesting, but at this point anything is better than nothing, so I'll try to do a bit more on that front.

Anyways, the world's been a rough place these past few years so I hope everyone's managing as best they can. My rock modeling rants don't really hold a candle to the larger issues of the world, but hopefully it's at least a worthwhile distraction. Stay safe and take care everyone!

Cheers,
Jordy