Producing garbage

This is one of the most interesting topics I know, so you are in for (possibly a incoherent ramble but still..) a treat!
Producing garbage the most difficult thing of the common stickler there ever was. I am a stickler and it makes it super hard to adhere to this principle. I find it super hard to do what I talked about before, namely to say: "well it's a box where the main character should be, but you know what that is still progress!". I tend to get stuck in the details and it generally only ever leads to no progress at all. Really I will actually go right now to pick out the hard-drive from my former server (as it died I have all my older git repos there so I can't access any of it), so that I can show some of the horrible attempts at perfection at first try I've done.

But first, I just want to say a couple of words about something different. I always felt a lack of resources about process, design and follow through I guess. I used to be super interested in game-engine construction. It is really fun and I kind of threw it all out once Unreal Engine 4 were released with modern business ideas, the fact that Unity followed right after is just gravy. Today you can even run it all in linux so that really makes my attempts at engineering a game engine seem pretty useless. However that is perfectly fine! What I realized instead is that I am of course a programmer by profession and I have a lot of experience, I identify as a programmer. However now I can focus on design which is an even older passion in many ways. I always loved to write stories and it makes sense. The designer in me is however a completely different topic. What I wanted to mention is how I always looked for a book which would teach me to "think" correctly and I am afraid I never found it. It came from experience and failure and even more importantly success. I would love to write a step-by-step guide to design but I feel that it is almost impossible to put into words how to go about it all. When I started my first game engine (yeah I have written a fair amount of half baked game engines) I wanted to find a flow of it, like "first do input module, move onto message system, get gl-context to prepare for renderer, do text module, start writing generic render object..." I mean it would be a huge guide of course, and I even read some books trying to achieve this. But I don't want to make Guy Someone's guide to write this game engine. And that right there is the essence, to build your system you need to use that as your guide. However gloomy as it may sound there are some great resources and if you had to just read one (apart from actual programming resources such as learning programming in the first place) resource Game design patterns written by Robert Nystrom would be what you are looking for. To anyone writing any code for games this is a great resource to have in your baggage.

Now back to the topic, and I have taken the liberty to get that hard-drive. And I am going to talk about some failures and why they failed.

Early model of a character, proving the point that as a bare essential you will need to know what you are going to create before you start.

First out is this image of a character I am not even sure what I wanted it to be, but I had a kind of cartoon looking cat in mind. The final but it is at a stage where it would have been reasonable to stop and think of a couple of things. First of all, what am I using it for? I mean sure enough this could become a decent cartoon looking cat so what will I make of that? Do I need a cartoon looking cat? Well as a matter of fact it was something I did need, how to use it not so much, and I didn't really have a clear enough idea of what I actually wanted to create. What I did get out from creating it (the garbage as it is today) is that I actually know what I want to do from that. I don't want to create a 10k-polygons half-good cat that's for sure. But I know it now, I know that I do want this type of character, and I know that I can't make it without a plan. I mean the last statement is obvious I know, but it is important and worth stating.

So let's talk about the future of this cat, I mean I want to do something with it, perhaps this model as is is doomed but it does kind of act as a reference and there are things with it that I want to keep. So how to move forward from here?

I guess first of all I would just say: ok, I am done with it, let's create a simple two-or-so-hundred polygon version which I can rig if I need to or leave without animation for now. Yeah, it's really what I am saying, we are done for now. So I would tuck it away, perhaps I will write some facts and stuff about the character, give it a name and perhaps even make some doodles to edge out the ideas. I would also want to work it into the bigger picture which is the story of the game. This character I am talking about here is a bit special as it is intended to be a main character. So I already have loads of ideas for it.

I meant this post to be about creating garbage but became a hybrid towards handling failure and learning from it. So, there will be a part 2 focusing more on the topic. This was meant to be a bit longer and focus on multiple examples as might be seen from the text at times, but I feel this is quite enough for one post.

So for now, thankful for the reads, and do share if you like it. I guess we are nearing more "real content" now and figuring out how and what I write here. The ideas in this specific post is for a game which I will be a subject many more times. I will try to make it clear when you could expect it having a spoiler like quality to it. Thanks for reading, and for sharing.