Hello. I’m Everette, aka Digx7, and I’m looking for work in the games industry. In the meantime, I’m working on various projects.. This is my Dev Diary for 5/10 through 7/4.
Those observant among you will notice a massive date gap for this dev diary compared to my previous 2 entries. I am still relatively new to this and am trying to figure out a writing/working schedule I can stick to long term. So, even though my past entries were about 2 weeks apart, this one will cover about 2 months. I could get upset and despair over this gap, but since I know no one is reading these and that these are only for me I instead just carry on. I want these blogs to both show future employers my progress but also be a way for me to collect my thoughts.
So rather than despair the only thing to do is keep moving forward and refine the process as I go. To that end here is what I was up to over the last 2 months.
5/10 - 5/16 & 5/27
I spent this week and a later day working on a variety of smaller tasks and making headway on art prep and level gray boxing. Art is not my strong suit, even though I do have some basic drawing skills. Looking back on it I definitely had a ton of likely valid imposter syndrome weighing me down. I’m decent at programming, I know that, so I don’t really stress over whether or not my code is good. I have no clue if my art is good or not. So the entire time I spent working on art I had this looming, almost dranging sense, that none of it was good anyway.
Also I’m far less familiar with the process for making game art than I am for making game code. I know it in theory, but the actual practice of it, not so much. From the outside it feels like I’m expecting myself to create the final environment assets, character animations, and world layouts in one elegant wave of a brush.
I know that’s not the case.
In drawing I know that sometimes I have to slowly build up the basic shape first, then add more and more details over time to get an image to where I want it. It’s the same in game art. Starting with a simple shape, a simple layout, then slowly working it up. I know all this in theory, in practice though… its hard.
For me clear forward progress, with a logical start and end point, with a clear goal, is what I have found most helpful. It’s why I like programming. You are working with clear logical steps, and a very clear goal. At the end the program works or it doesn’t. With art though… it could always be improved.
I say this all to show that well I’m slowly learning this lesson, it is a hard one for me. Thus this week was stressful for me. But, given that I want to make games for a living I realize that it is a lesson I must learn.
Regardless, allow me to go over what I accomplished this week.
The game art process as I understand it is this:
- Gather reference images
- Create concept art/mockups
- Iterate on those mock ups refining more and more details
- Create final assets these may be the last mockups
On the scale of the entire game you may be iterating over everything at once. Right now I am just working on the first chapter of my game to work out these processes. So I began this process with the environment and the key characters.
For the characters, I chose the POV character Ion and his mentor Six. I began with gathering the reference images and then making some concept art.
Ion Reference Images
Six Reference Images
Both characters are part of a steampunk-esc society that makes mechanical companions, weapons, armor, and tools to help improve the lives of the citizens. Six is a robot that is a mix between a special forces unit, and a detective. Ion is their human trainee/apprentice. The society they live in is run by an AI that includes humans in its operations as a kind of check against its own power. I want their society to be ruled by an AI, not skynet, but not a utopia, just a messy government that is trying its best, like any modern government.
Therefore both characters can share a lot of similar reference images. For both I like the visual image of a glowing engine or light at their core that powers them, or their armor. For Ion I’m wanting to go for a cool steampunk power armor look but don’t want it to appear too bulky like a Space Marine. And for Six I really like the idea of a cowboy/gunslinger look, but I don’t want firearms to be prevalent in this world.
Ion and Six Concept Art
After gathering the reference images I tried making a pixel art concept image. It started as a silhouette test but I felt like trying my hand at details as well. This is not final, and my biggest worry was that no one would even know what it was by looking at it. But after showing it to a few people in discord those fears were alleviated. Still not sure if I want to use pixel art as I can’t get that art style to look the way I want.
Regardless I still feel I need to make some more concept art of these characters to really nail down their look and feel.
I also started this art process for the environment
Bostra Reference Images 1
Bostra Reference Images 2
For Bostra I’m thinking of going for a medieval town/remote village vibe but I’m not sure yet. Regardless, an interesting thing I learned was how the style of medieval houses were affected by the types of trees available which in turn were affected by the climate. In colder climates you would see more log cabin style houses whereas in warmer climates you would see more wattle and daub type houses.
Wattle and Daub Example
Still not sure if this is the direction I want to go in.
Regardless I have gone ahead and gray boxed all the exterior and interior areas of the town.
Gray Box Images
I still need to do the surrounding forests. Again my imposter syndrome really kicked in here with the gray boxing process and has caused me to drag in this process a lot. Honestly, I wish I’d written this dev diary soon as writing out my thoughts now is really helping. One thing I’m thinking through as I gray box the environments is how to make them interesting to navigate and not be boring, not just to be one long corridor you walk through.
This process did involve me cutting one area of the town and combining it with another.
In this chapter Ion and Six go to Bostra after it experiences a resource boom. Some really valuable local wildlife has begun appearing and has attracted a ton of hunters and 2 hunter guilds to the town. However, said wildlife appears to be more dangerous or crafty than expected, resulting in the disappearance of a massive hunting party recently. As a result Ion and Six are called in to investigate. Previously the town was split up into 3 areas: Old Bostra: the farming town that was there before the boom, New Bostra: a vibrant trading hub where both of the hunters guild and various groups that follow them have setup, The Slums: A tent city of wanna be hunters or camp followers that has also appeared.
Since both New Bostra and The Slums were tent cities set up just outside Old Bostera it was making less and less sense to separate them. In this world resource booms like this are common enough that some groups follow them around in a nomadic lifestyle. I realized this means they’d likely use tents as well meaning both New Bostra and The Slums would both be tent cities. So I decided to combine them. This also cuts down on the number of locations I’d have to create.
I’m thinking of at least finishing the grayboxing process for all areas of chapter one before starting on making concept art for the areas and props.
In this week I also tackled a few smaller things like: getting a navigable pause menu, adding one way platforms, and fixing a camera bug.
6/10 - 6/15
I spent this week focusing on getting my main website setup.
I go into more detail on this in my post The Making of: This Website
Below is the shorter version.
I had previously found out about github pages when looking for where best to post these blogs. Github Pages is a free service on Github where you can host a website directly in a repo. It’s geared towards simpleler static or low traffic websites, with its main use case being to host detailed documentation for a given repository. It has tools in place to make a website from a few simple text files up to all the usual HTML, CSS, and JS and the various frameworks. It even lets you make one organization site per account or one site per repository.
It does have a hard limit of not allowing any commercial transitions, and soft limits on traffic and the total website size. But it does have free hosting.
So it was perfect for building my portfolio website.
Portfolio Site Homepage
I already had the rough outlines of what I wanted the website to look and feel like from previous attempts at making a website. Using those I started with building up the HTML scaffold and asking Chat-GPT to give me the starting CSS files to make it look pretty with a minimalist darkmode tech vibe. From there I built up the site using Jekyll a framework that GitHub pages provides that allows for basic CRUD operations and dynamic linking to other site pages to give me the following pages:
- Homepage
- Resume
- Projects listing all the projects I’ve worked on
- Blogs listing all the blogs I’ve worked on
- Article a template page used for all individual projects and blogs
The parts of this project that took the longest was figuring out what exactly I could do with Jekyll and getting the CSS to look exactly the way I wanted. Even though Jekyll has a remarkably simple way of letting you add metadata to individual articles and creating templates for various pages, it still took a bit of time to learn at first. The CSS took a while to get exactly right as the process involved fine tuning the specific wording of a few key CSS tags. Both of these problems were exacerbated by the fact that I am not as familiar with web development as I am with other areas. So there was a lot of looking-up what others might consider basic terms.
In the end I had a website that looked nice, is free to host, and allows me to easily add new pages to it. There’s always more that could be fine tuned, but overall I consider it a success. Now I just have to use it more often.
6/22 - 6/27
I spent this week volunteering at RFKC (Royal Family Kids Camp) a summer camp for foster kids ages 5-12.
RFKC Logo
This was my third year in a row volunteering and each year I do video/tech work for them. As you do at a summer camp. At the end of each day the kids get to watch a 15 minute slideshow/video recapping everything they did that day. The kids love it. So I get to spend all day working on said video.
The process involves me filming and editing all day up until the very last minute to get something together for the kids. I’m helped by 3 other photographers who spend the entire day taking photos as well. The photos also get printed out and go in a personal memory book that each kid gets to take home. Those photos, combined with the videos I’m taking, together make the final product that the kids get to watch.
It is both super fun and super stressful work. Fun because of what I’m making and seeing the kids and counselors’ amazing reactions to it at the end of the day. Many of the kids go crazy when they see themselves on the screen, and for some it’s their favorite part of the day. Stressful because of the tight deadline the camp is a week long and I need to put together a video each day by 8pm.
As the years have gone on I’ve gotten better and better at the process and don’t stress nearly as much about it anymore. I still stress a bit though.
Complicating this year was the fact that we went to a new camp location. I can not disclose where for legal reasons. The group I volunteered with the last 2 years had been using the same camp location for the past 20 or so years. Sadly last year that camp ground was sold and is now being developed into a housing complex.
So we needed a new location.
The location we found was super nice. The logistics were hard though. Over the 20 years at the old camp location our volunteer staff and the campsites staff had become super familiar with each other’s process and schedule to the point of barely even needing to communicate.
Obviously we didn’t have that luxury at the new site.
So over the first half of the week there were multiple times when we thought a certain location or activity would be open, thought we had communicated it with the camp staff, had told all the kids it would be open, and it was not. At one point nearly half our group had to wait an hour longer than expected for the pool to open. It was stressful for everyone involved.
However, it sounded like the way our group’s leadership handled those conversations with the camp staff was way better than the camp staff expected. Combining this with multiple comments from the camp staff that the way our volunteers handled the kids with so much more patience than they are used to seeing resulted in the camp staff bending over backwards for us by the end of week.
They really wanted us back next year.
And so far the consensus is to return to that same camp location next year.
For my part I’m glad I was able to volunteer again this year. It’s something I can see myself volunteering at for the following years, as long as life allows.
The missing dates
Observant readers will catch that there are many weeks un accounted for. What happened? Was I not working on anything during those weeks?
Well I’d like to lie and say I was, the truth was I wasn’t. I think a combination of working on this game on and off for about 6 months plus the thoughts I mentioned in the art section about my imposter syndrome resulted in a bit of burn out. I do want to keep working on my projects but I have to acknowledge this.
During this time I was instead reading a lot, listening to audio books, and playing games. In that time I finally finished the Wheel of Time series and listened through all The Stormlight Archives books. Both of which did give me plenty of ideas and inspirations for my projects.
But how best to avoid this burnout going forward? I think 2 things.
- Writing these dev diaries more. Probably not posting them more often then 2 weeks at most, but getting my thoughts written down might help. Even writing down my thoughts on my art stuff from back in May feels like it helps.
- Realize that realistically I’m the only one who’s gonna be reading these for a bit, if at all, so I should make these for myself first. Enjoy the process rather than stress over if anyone is actually watching or not. Journey before Destination.
No guarantee that it will work, but it’s a start. The next step even. Can you tell I really liked The Stormlight Archive
Regardless, that’s all for this entry. Not sure what I want to focus on for the next few weeks. Possibly another art pack. I’d like to participate in the GMTK game jam at the end of the month. No guarantees that either will happen, just my thoughts at the moment.
And as always: Don’t Stop Creating.
