#how I do it :-)

[askagamedev]

I remember watching a documentary on the development of Jedi: Fallen Order and seeing a part where they are focusing on a stable build. They apparently had 1,000+ bugs they needed squashed to accomplish this. As a gamer, this seems like an unrealistic amount.

Is it? How is it possible they were able to not only introduce, but also find that many bugs? Even for a studio that's a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, I can't imagine the Quality Assurance team finding even over 100.

Sorry for the longer question, but this always blew my mind. Thanks!

How do they find that many bugs? Consider - in AAA games, we bring on entire teams of QA to test every day during production. Imagine 50 testers each find only five bugs a day from a full eight hours of testing. That's logging a combined 250 bugs daily. In a week, you've got 1,250 bugs. After a month, that's 5,000 bugs. A year would be 60,000 bugs. Most testers can find more than five in a day, especially early in development.

To give you an idea of what things are like in the trenches, take my example. Two days ago, I personally fixed bug number 522,096 on my current project. I'm currently working on bug number 474,991. These are not randomly generated numbers. When I joined the team (roughly two years ago) I started working on bugs and tasks numbered in the mid 30,000s. QA finds and logs a lot of bugs.

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[teethwitheyes101-blog]

I love live LOVE how you draw scales on dragons. Do you perhaps have any tips when doing it? I struggle to draw them a lot.

Alrrr! :))

First of all before anything I do lineart, which is pretty normal, then I get the base colours down.

It usually is a fade like shown in 1.

Then I get a colour that is usually lighter and more saturated and do small brush strokes or circles with a soft brush in a row down.

I like doing overlapping scales, in icewings and hivewings i like to do more jagged scales like shown in the green patch, With other tribes like nightwings I do smoother scales like shown in the navy blue patch.

It also depends on the character, like if i was drawing a villainous character, I’d do more jagged, sharp scales, and if I were drawing a softer, more kind character I’d do bigger and rounder scales.

I do bigger scales towards the spine, and smaller and less near the underbelly, but if the dragon has repeated designs down the body, I’d do bigger scales towards the designs.

That’s basically all I got, overall, practice! It took me 9 years and like 10 different styles to get where I am today! Not everyone’s gonna be perfect straight away, do what makes you happy! Hope this made sense for y’all <33

[shakballoonshack]

It's Wednesday so you know what that means, #tutorialwednesday for all. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it I might want to make this a Thursday thing. Oh well, it's probably fine. But this is how to make a balloon horse

[heretherebedork]

Hi heretherebedork! How do you make gifs? I want to start but have no idea how, and would appreciate your advice. Thank you!

So! I have two methods, one is easier for me in general and the other one is a bit more finicky and I only use it when I have to despite it probably being technically better.

Note: I make all my gifs on my desktop computer so if you wanna do this on mobile... I've got no idea.

Anyway, easy method, only really useable if the video is on youtube.

First step: https://gifrun.com/

Second step: https://www.photopea.com/

And then just... play around with it? Look up better tutorials that I can't follow. I just go under the images menu to adjustment and edit directly on the gif which is... wrong. But every gif tutorial involves not doing that and since I've never figured out the not-doing-that thing... I don't?

Harder method!

First step: Download video

Second step: Open in VLC player

Third step: Record the snippet you want to gif

Fourth step https://www.photopea.com/ add video and convert to a gif

And then, boom, same as above to just play around. This does give higher quality gifs (and much bigger, though you typically need to shrink them for tumblr) but my computer really struggles with it so I tend to only do it when I have to aka the show really just isn't on youtube and I can find a way to get the video. I have never figured out downloading off most sites so... it's not super helpful, sorry.

Then you finish everything off by exporting as a gif and... enjoy!

[yeepof]

I understand that tall men are our POV characters, but surely being like a foot taller than everyone around them would have some occasional consequences

[bumblingbabooshka]

Vulcan teen on Vulcan [tiktok] saying "I have just lost track of my father in the grocery store." The camera turns to show the viewers the grocery store in which almost every single older middle-aged man has a bowlcut and long robes. Camera turns back to show the teen's face which is expressionless and yet communicates all it needs to.

[mayhemchicken-artblog]

in the hour or so it took me to draw this op turned reblogs off

EDIT: reblogs are STAYING OFF. op was right and correct and i have never regretted making a post as much as this one. if you want to reblog my art you can reblog something else from my blog. or commission me, lord knows i deserve financial compensation for the nightmare this post has put me through

[some-pers0n]

I'm always entertained by people doing those "canon VS fanon" memes where both are misunderstanding characters to such a violent degree 'cause like

[phantom-shell]

Fiddleford found one of his old shirts

[askagamedev]

Have you got any advice for a dev that has lost passion? I got in the industry to make games, and though I've worked in the industry for 8 years I don't feel I've had a meaningful impact on any project I've worked on. I consistently feel underqualified in roles and yet continue to studio hop towards promotion without issue. I have never shipped a game. I've lost interest in the craft as I don't feel like it matters to someone like me. I feel despondent and purposeless, I'd like to care again.

It sounds a lot like you're dealing with burnout. One of the quickest recipes for burnout is putting all of the value on the results of the work rather than finding the work itself inherently rewarding - valuing the explicit reward instead of an implicit one. These two aren't always causal, which can result in this disjointed feeling and lack of motivation. Since you're not seeing any results from your work, it feels like a lot of wasted time and energy.

The quickest way to provide that explicit reward is to see players enjoying the results of your work. This doesn't have to be through a shipped game, it can be through your own personal projects as well. One of our Discord members enjoys posting his own personal playable game projects to our indie channel, where people can try them. These are not massively scoped games, but they are fun and the play testers do appreciate them. The feeling that your work is not wasted is important to getting validation that your efforts are worthwhile.

A longer-term solution to switch to implicit enjoyment of your work is to embrace a sense of detachment from the results of your work and focus on doing tasks that you enjoy doing for their own sake. I don't focus on what the results of my work will get me when I go into my job at all. I focus on the part of the work I find inherently rewarding and interesting - I treat my tasks like puzzles and I solve them. The feeling of solving a puzzle is rewarding and interesting to me on its own, I would feel good solving problems and puzzles all day long. The other stuff - the rewards for doing well at work and the promotions and whatever - are obviously important and there is some long-term meta-game strategy, but the day-to-day job satisfaction is entirely based on doing the things I find inherently engaging to begin with.

You might not find that to be the case (or even possible) in your current place of employment, or even in general. What is job satisfaction worth to you? Perhaps you could find a new employer that matches your needs better? It's difficult to say for sure. I also suggest talking to a therapist about this. Therapists are there to advocate for and provide context to you in the field of mental health. Pursuing a career that is more engaging is certainly a reasonable goal that a mental health professional should be able to assist with. A good mental health professional should certainly help you identify and work through the feelings of burnout you've expressed.

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[pppuri]

you and me and the devil makes three

[shakballoonshack]

So you want to learn my secrets? You want to be the balloon guy for your people? Well you can have it, I left all of my knowledge here, in... not one piece, but still. It's here, you can learn my stuff

[anthropologist-on-the-loose]

I'm as grateful for cellphones as the next person, but sometimes I think about how everyone having a phone on them at all times really did cause us to loose some things as a society. I mean - for example, kids these days will never experience their car breaking down and needing to find the nearest place with a phone they can use. They're never going to have the opportunity to tentatively approach a house only to discover that it's full of queer people having a party hosted by a transvestite to celebrate his creation of a sex homunculus, stay the night, and loose their virginity while unintentionally partaking in cannibalism. It's tragic, that kind of gay sexual awakening just doesn't happen these days because of cellphones.

[bags-of-regret]

Oh god theres more

[potofsoup]

Oh look, it seems like there's a Republican-led movement to purge voter rolls in the lead-up to the election! It's almost as if your vote matters and they don't want you to vote! Anyway, I whipped up a quick map (based on this) that shows when the voter registration deadline is in each state. There are a few deadlines coming up in the next week or so.

If you live in a state that regularly purges voter rolls for infrequent voters (the orange ones in the first map), or if you moved recently, it's good to check if you're still registered to vote.

Vote.org makes it super easy to check your registration: https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

Just put in your address and DOB and they'll tell you whether you're registered. (And they give you a quick link to register online if it turns out that you're not! Only the 9 states in white on my map don't have online registration, and for those they provide instructions on how to do it via mail or in person.) If you want an extra verification, find your state's election website and double-check there.

So yeah, give yourself peace of mind -- do a quick check. :)