Arbiter - Monthly Recap - January 2024

Greetings, travellers! 

Hope everyone's easing their way into the new year nicely. Me personally? My life rocks. Not in the fun "rock-and-roll" way mind you, but in the "everytime-I-close-my-eyes-I-see-the-zbrush-viewport-taunting-me-with-gradient-nothingness-while-framing-all-of-my-existential-dread-into-a-literal-rock" kinda way. Really excited for that roll part tho. 👍

It's Always the Damn Rocks

Had a bit of art block this month so I wasn't quite as productive as I wanted to be, but I feel like I'm slowly working my way out of it. I've reached a new tier of problem in that while I feel pretty good about making assets now, designing the more specific ones in a way that looks good while still working mechanically has been a bit tricky. 

Most environment assets just need to look decent and not get in the player's way with their geometry, usually abstract of any meaningful mechanical interaction. Some assets are intentionally built for mechanics however, which means making certain compromises on their design in order to keep them functional as a readable affordance. 

The wall running mechanic is one of my more annoying affordances because it requires surfaces to be more or less completely flat so players can run on them. This can be a little annoying to work with from an artistic perspective because you want to have good looking rocks/walls with a healthy amount of shape variety, but you also have to keep it flat, which ends up being a bit counterproductive. 

I essentially spent the month iterating the designs of these surfaces to find a comfortable middleground, while also iterating on my texturing process to help add some depth to those flatter areas. The results have been...okay? But not quite where I want to be. 

The in-game scenes are a bit of a mess right now, so please enjoy this viewport render without textures instead! Yippee!

These are some of my better looking experiments, but they still didn't quite work out in game how I'd liked. These were all sculpted in ZBrush with the intent of making some floating platforms that could be used for wall running, but they came out a bit too blocky for my tastes. At this point I'm debating on whether I want to stick to sculpting or go for a simpler approach with more reusable textures, as while the sculpting process leads to better detail overall, it takes a lot longer to iterate on. Decisions, decisions, decisions!

While it feels nice to improve my sculpting skills, test things out, and just see what works and what doesn't, it does hurt a bit spending a few weeks on something only to find it mostly unusable. I'm a very momentum-driven person so I really hate getting stuck on stuff like this, but I get that iteration and practice are just part of the good 'ol Artistic Journey ™. Thankfully I'm trying to be decently modular about how I make the environments, so once I've solved the problem for this level, it'll more or less be solved for the others aside from some minor design changes. 

Something I am enjoying about environmental art is the modularity aspect. It sucks having weeks like these where I don't get as much done as I want to, but it feels amazing when you finally crack it and now have assets that can be used for ALL of your levels. It's like piercing multiple layers of development at once. 

While I still have to work through some of the more technical art problems like this, I'm feeling pretty close to where I want to be overall. I can crank out assets pretty quickly when I know exactly what I'm making, so it's mostly just these edge cases that have been tripping me up lately. But internally I'm really starting to feel closer and closer to that "domain expansion" moment where it all clicks and I can just make the remaining levels. I'm sure more of these little problems will crop up over time, but for now at least this is really the last "wall" in my way. Afterwards, I can just make shit.

On the plus side, being stuck behind said wall has gotten me pretty excited for the future. I'm getting much better at visualizing how I want the environments to look, and dealing with more problematic areas like this has helped me appreciate the more hassle-free stuff I can already do. I'm excited to leverage that as my skills improve and really start building some momentum with asset production so I can crank out these levels. 

Conclusion

Anyways, sorry for the shorter recap this month. While I ended last year on some really high highs, art block truly does not care about your current emotional state and it WILL come for you when you least expect it. I'm used to it just being part of the process now, but I do hope to  find a nice compromise over the next week or so. 

One last thing I'll say is that while these moments of art block are super annoying, I've never been in a better place creatively than I have in the past few months working on Arby. I think about it constantly. In my spare time I've been tying up lots of loose ends I hadn't fully ironed out, refining character dynamics and overall themes, and just really honing in on my sense of storytelling and what I want to say. 

It genuinely feels like in pursuing a better understanding of art for the sake of the environments, my understanding of art as a whole has improved. Visual art, music, storytelling—they really are just different ways of expressing the same thing: a theme. In better understanding what thematic cohesion truly looks like, I feel like my sense of what Arbiter's really about has become much more pronounced overall.

Some of my absolute best ideas have bloomed during this growth arc, so while I'm sitting here fuming about rocks of all things, my motivation to bring those ideas to life has never been higher. All the more reason why I'm excited to get past these relatively minor issues and really start bringing everything together. We've still got a ways to go, but we're getting there!

Thanks for the support as always, everyone!

Cheers,
Jordy