Theory

[lemec]

[Topic spun off from here: http://culture.vg/forum/topic?p=21108#p21108 --icy]


Thank you for your enthusiastic welcome.

In North 'Murrica, there's a lot of college programs devoted to schooling aspiring young minds in the trade of game development. These courses are expensive and land many a student in debt. I've taught for some of these college programs, along with some programs meant for animation and I feel that kids are far too dependent on being told how to do things and what they should do. They just don't explore things enough on their own and are almost entirely focused upon earning a piece of paper that employers don't care about.

In addition, a lot of people I meet online ask me which drawing textbooks they should pick up, which programming textbooks they should read -- to which I answer that you should just have a goal in mind, try to do it, and see how you fail. Figure out what went wrong yourself. People at large production companies don't have time to teach you anything.

Which leads me to another point: large production companies work by way of production pipelines. Simply put, it is like a giant relay race where one guy after another hands down something they've worked on to the next guy in a hierarchy not unlike an assembly line. But that's only the ideal.

When I worked as an artist in the visual effects industry (many of these skills carry over into the games industry, especially when you get these ridiculously overproduced cinematics), I had to deal with art directors that had NO experience doing any of our jobs, let alone the jobs of any of their hapless peons. As a result we get inane advice like: "Make it more magical." and "Make it better." Examples of this are present in nearly every industry where creativity is concerned and I chalk it up to clueless people in managerial positions who know nothing of what their workers must do.

To make matters worse, the students who are coming out of schools don't have much idea of what others have to deal with. For example, a concept artist must come up with ideas for character modellers, but it's all too easy to draw something which cannot be modeled, is full of non-manifold surfaces, cannot be properly rigged and will probably not make it into a game. If the concept artist had some experience as a modeller, then this sort of mistake could be avoided.

I believe that video games are a very special art form in that they can and often do incorporate many forms of media such as writing, sound, music, sculpture (virtual), drawing, painting, all of which are held together by programming -- but you can't just mash all these things together and expect a good game to come out. You need to understand the value of each form of media in order to use it, and the best way to understand the value of something is to produce it yourself.

Games need not be a rocket science. Blackjack requires only a deck of cards. Chess requires only 32 pieces and an 8x8 grid environment. Games like Tetris and Asteroids require only minimal geometric drawing (and very tight controls and rules), but naturally as you become more and more ambitious, you require more and more skills and effort. But this does not mean simply throwing more people at a project, which is what a lot of big companies try to do, which brings me back to my previous point: your staff needs interdisciplinary skills or the end result will be something that seems stuck together with spackle and duct tape.

Remember, the earliest video games were made by either individuals working out of their garages and basements or by very small teams. However, we no longer need to work in Assembly or work within the same constraints of a 640kB RAM, though I feel that a lot of today's programmers could have benefited from developing games during such spartan times.

And lastly, video games ARE software. Yes, they're a different category of software than say, Microsoft Excel or Adobe Photoshop or AutoCAD, but when we play video games, we fire up this application that gives us a goal, a task, and it gives us the tools to get things done. We don't just play and explore in a video game, we work in it. Software developers who don't get this point create games with terrible controls, terrible UI layouts, terrible rules, terrible flow, it's like they're out of touch with how it FEELS to use a piece of software, like they don't use their own software to improve their lives and play their own games for entertainment.

So yes, I would love to work on a team to make games with other people. Actually, I already have, but that was for doing visual effects. Some of the game jams I've done with other people have left me with the feeling that I could have done their jobs better, and the jams where I made a game completely solo gave me the most satisfying results. When you work with competent people, it's the best thing in the world because you can divide the workload. When you work with incompetents, it's the worst, because more often than not, the workload is multiplied.

As the saying goes: "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."

[icycalm]

In North 'Murrica, there's a lot of college programs devoted to schooling aspiring young minds in the trade of game development. These courses are expensive and land many a student in debt. I've taught for some of these college programs, along with some programs meant for animation and I feel that kids are far too dependent on being told how to do things and what they should do.

Right. Kids should instead be told to SELF-TEACH THEMSELVES ALONE EVERYTHING ON THEIR OWN BY THEMSELVES, etc. etc. etc., which would beat the purpose of enrolling in a class, which beats the purpose of having any universities at all, and so on and so forth. Why not go the whole hog and tell people to simply stop talking to each other? Then incompetent, talentless fuckwits like you would not feel so bad about their incapacity to learn anything.

And the rest of your post is full of bullshit like this too, I am sure, but I skipped to the last line:

As the saying goes: "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself."

Not if you are a fuckwit you shouldn't! Have you heard of THAT saying?

So, the main point of this thread is summarized in the title I gave to your shitpost, and that's the end of the discussion. If you bother me again with your inane bullshit I will ban you. Have a nice day.

[icycalm]

I just went ahead and banned him. He's obviously a fuckhead anyway. lol ASTEROIDZ WAS MAID BY TOO PEOPL THEREFARE DEUS EX 4 SHULD BE MAID BY A GRANDMA WHO TAUGHT HERSELF etc.

Fuckhead.