#so I learned a bit of super basic 2D rigging :3 It's so over for yall

[arkarti]

That's how it went right? 👀

Tiktok | Youtube

[randomationmedia]

It's already been 10 years since I first created the Randomation Pictures YouTube channel. I feel the need to share this story because it’s cathartic for me.

I remember how excited I was at age 11 when I first began using Pivot Stickfigure Animator during 2006. Going from sketching stickmen in notebooks to making them come to life on the screen ignited a passion that would eventually carry me into game development. I wanted to be just like the “famous” animators on YouTube. I wanted to create the same kind of fluid and funny scenarios that would draw in hundreds of thousands of viewers and propel me into the spotlight of this rapidly growing platform for sharing videos.

As time went on, I managed to animate a number of videos of gradually increasing quality, but nothing spectacular. I also dabbled in game development with early versions of Game Maker, but didn't achieve much as I struggled to wrap my head around the process of designing software.

Eventually my passion for animation transformed into passion for game development. This was accompanied by decreasing motivation and an inability to finish any videos worth watching. During 2012 I started using the Unity engine for the first time, enthralled by the opportunity to create interactive 3D worlds of my own creation. Now the goal was to create a successful indie game published on a platform like Steam.

After learning the basics of Unity, I embarked on a journey to create an open world stunt-driving game not unlike Burnout Paradise (the game most responsible for inspiring me to develop). With my lack of foresight in how to build stable software that isn't drenched in technical debt and the degree of inexperience required to believe the idea was even feasible in the first place, it's easy to see how that turned out.

The project was dead in the water and I didn't know what I was going to do next, or if I even wanted to do anything. That was until someone showed interest in purchasing the vehicle physics of the project. Despite the code being objectively awful, the core driving physics were very satisfying to interact with and were robust in how they reacted to environmental geometry. Out of all of the things I can do, I feel that game physics has always been the skill I'm most adept with and is the only aspect of game development I still actually enjoy working with.

The situation of seeing value in my vehicle physics led me to strip down the project and sell it as Randomation Vehicle Physics on the Unity Asset Store. This was my first source of income ever, and having anywhere from $300 to almost $1000 coming in each month as an 18-year-old still living at home was incredible. My will to develop was in full force again, but now I chose to dial things back a bit in terms of ambition and create a 2D platformer that would become Waffles (And Then Some).

The game was originally going to be based on an unfinished Game Maker project of mine that was about running across trains and shooting. The characters in this new project were going to be small and square, and the movement mechanics felt unintentionally similar to Super Meat Boy. However, the levels and theme were still unique enough to differentiate it. That is, until the level design started to feel boring and I had to redirect it. For whatever reason I decided to make the main character a waffle and make the theme about breakfast (old YouTube videos and LittleBigPlanet levels have reflected a strange affinity for this theme). Now the game was about a square-shaped food character that could sprint and wall-jump through punishingly difficult levels. To my chagrin, the Steam Greenlight comments were exactly what I expected them to be.

I chose not to publish the game on Steam because I didn't think it was worth selling anymore by the time it was greenlit out of the blue some 7 months after I originally posted it there. I also managed to get somewhat burnt out again by the time I finished it despite its relative simplicity.

Shortly after Waffles (And Then Some) was finished I began working on a kart racer known as The Fastest Meal of the Day. Mario Kart 8 came out shortly before that and inspired me to make a kart racer with the same caliber of graphics, but with the mechanics of Crash Team Racing. That might have been too ambitious (spoiler: it was). The same kind of development process followed, with the same kind of results as before. Grandiose ideas and world-building that will never come to fruition with nothing but an undercooked project and some work-in-progress videos to show for it.

I released the unfinished build and called it a day while feeling burnt-out yet again. However, I still had work to do as Unity 5 was around the corner and I knew I would have to update my vehicle physics for it. The problem with this is that the new version of Unity broke the behavior of wheel colliders from Unity 4 projects, so my vehicle physics could not function correctly in it.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do about this, until I started experimenting with making rigidbodies levitate in a balanced way using only raycasts and pure additions of force. I figured out how to do this by adding not just a basic floating force (upward constant), but by limiting this force with dampening (subtracting current velocity of point where force is applied on rigidbody). With this I had a crude model for vehicle suspensions, and thus a stable floating rigidbody. With that I knew I could write my own wheel and suspension models without the use of Unity's wheel colliders.

Over the course of a few months I developed Randomation Vehicle Physics 2.0 and launched it just a week or two after Unity 5 launched. It was a relative hit and I was over the moon “raking in” anywhere from $1000 to $1700 a month and still living at home. This was the peak of my happiness, fulfillment, and confidence out of my whole body of work over the past decade. The feeling of having that much disposable income at my fingertips and having people praise and find value in my work was overwhelming in the best of ways. Queue overzealous amiibo collecting.

With my reborn zest (I was feeling very doubtful and anxious before releasing RVP 2) I started working on the kart racer project from scratch again. The old code was abysmal (the main kart script was 3 or 4 thousand lines long and handled everything from physics to particles and audio) and the physics were not too good, even though they looked great on video. I chose to take an approach where the rotation of the karts is completely controlled by scripting and not the physics engine, leading to much more consistent behavior along with suspension based on RVP 2. I continued to work on it while occasionally stumbling over the aesthetic direction of the project and taking a month-long break to make Stickman Catapult 3D.

The good feelings ended a few months later when someone let me know RVP 2 was being “shared.” My heart sank as I tried to have the project taken down, only to see it reuploaded to another torrent site. Today I understand piracy as a legitimate way to see if software actually does what it claims to do in a world rife with early-access shovelware and DRM'd pre-order day-one DLC hotfix-patch-that-makes-things-worse culture. I also understand piracy is not truly theft because nothing is being stolen, just copied, and people who pirate might never purchase the asset anyways. At the time, however, I took it very personally and saw it as disrespecting my terms. It didn't help reading forums of people thanking each other for sharing it rather than thanking me for creating it in the first place, but I digress. I should have been grateful that something I made was valuable enough for people to take the “risk” of pirating in the first place.

Rather quickly, the butthurt brought on by piracy led to depression. I have had periodic bouts of depression prior to this, but the subsequent one was bad. Combined with my complete lack of a social life thanks to not bothering to keep in touch with high school friends, my obsession with game development hinging my entire self worth on my projects, and family issues I don't need to talk about, I was the most depressed I have ever been. RVP 2 was grossing less as well, but I don't believe this was directly correlated with the piracy. Sooner or later it had to slow down regardless of sharing.

I continued to work on The Fastest Meal of the Day even though it felt like a death march. I still consider it to be the hardest thing I have ever done. Making the characters was one of the last things I did through a tedious process of model, texture, rig, and animate. Verne and Castper were already put together from other prototype projects, but I still had 6 characters to create from scratch. Each one only took a few days but at that point I was waist-deep in a many months-long habit of spending most of my time every day working on the game.

I knew I wasn't going to sell the game. I knew it was only going to have 8 characters, 1 track, 1 mode, and no multiplayer, but I was ridiculously attached to the idea of creating some kind of polished 3D game that I can confidently show the world. All I did when I was done was throw it up on IndieDB and call it a day. I had already let go of the idea of publishing a successful game by myself and getting to be on the level of someone like the developers of Undertale or Stardew Valley. Someone who made a game mostly by theirself and gets to see thousands (millions?) of fans take in the virtual world you crafted and fill up forums discussing the characters, story, and game mechanics.

I still feel a pang in my chest when I read about how a game similar to those two is being ported to a new platform to be experienced by a new audience. I have had to work through feelings of envy and annoyance in order to try and feel happy for them. I am not entitled to success just because I put in a lot of effort, especially when my efforts have been so misguided. Trying to learn modeling, rigging, animation, texturing, foley, music composition, and programming mean nothing if I still haven't been able to produce a game worth selling. It’s just not-invented-here syndrome turned up to 11.

After finishing The Fastest Meal of the Day, I figured I should at least apply for game developer jobs. Surely having a game like that in my portfolio and being able to point to everything but the font and say, “I made that,” would be enough to land me a job at a studio that uses Unity? Not if my resume has no job experience or degree to speak of and I have no industry connections.

Depressed, burnt-out, and living at home with no degree and with no visible way to break into the game industry despite my hard work, I started applying for the same kind of jobs most 21-year-olds are qualified for. I found myself working full-time in retail and feeling mostly okay about it, because at least I was interacting with people on a regular basis, getting paid, and not “having” to develop games every day. I was at a point where getting to sit at home developing games all day seemed like hell, even though just a few years earlier in high school that is all I could dream about.

For at least several months I had absolutely no desire to develop anything. I truly believed I had put the nail in the coffin on the career of software engineering in general, not just games. I was content working in retail for almost 2 months and realized I don't want to do it for very long. (Who'da thunk it?) I chose to go to college full-time in pursuit of a bachelor's degree in computer science because I was beginning to warm up to the idea of programming again, but not so much game development.

Even with my hesitance toward game development I decided to start working on a mobile game in my free time, a basic multiplayer game where you play as a penguin and try to bump other penguins off of an ice berg. The game is still unfinished to this day and has been in development for about a year. School is not the only thing getting in the way of developing it. The other factors are my motivation and planning what exactly my free time should go into. The game and the process of realizing it just don't entice me. I don't really want to model everything, record sound effects, and write the music. I don't want to collaborate with someone either because I have a very clear idea of how those things should be, and I can't afford to pay people who would be able to do the jobs well. I haven't looked at the code in a while which makes it harder to work on that aspect and there is no monetary incentive because I was planning on making it free.

School has been eating up my savings from RVP and I need to work on things that make money. I'm considering going back into the asset business, maybe developing a kart racer kit or something else. Developing assets is not so hard, because they are essentially unfinished games. I may even pursue contract work if I have to. Plus, if I'm going to go into a more traditional software engineering role, I need to learn frameworks and work on projects that don't depend on Unity.

The only way I would pursue a career in game development is if I could work in my preferred role as a gameplay programmer at a company that doesn't depend on unpaid crunch time, doesn't lay off employees after a game ships, and offers decent benefits. As far as I'm concerned, that job does not exist, or is the kind of job that's immediately filled internally by someone in the network of connections.

I just want to get paid to write software and have a healthy work-life balance. This is not a defeatist attitude, but a realistic one. The dream I sought after in the game industry is so difficult to obtain that I would not even enjoy it after putting in the work to get there. It was and is an unhealthy obsession that I still struggle with, where even today I feel uncomfortable if I don't have some vague game idea bouncing around in my head that I want to work on at an unspecified time in the future.

One thing that stuck out to me while reflecting is the fact Randomation Vehicle Physics is the most successful thing I've ever made, and that's because it provides real value to other people. It was a catalyst for other aspiring developers' dreams of making some kind of driving game, or maybe just a product that can enhance a professional team's workflow. Either way, it helped other people much more than my own “selfish” projects have, which only served to express my own ideas. Developing assets from here on out makes the most sense because it requires less work than developing full games, is more likely to earn money, and can help others develop the games they want to make.

I am now 22 and look forward to finishing school in a few years and have mostly overcome my depression. Closing myself off from the world in pursuit of an attachment to a grandiose fantasy is no way to live. I wonder where I'll be in 2027.

[nickzimmermandesign]

Creative Output Project

For my Creative Output project, I decided to make concept art for a game that I’m working on. The game is a fast-paced 2D fighting game that I want to hand-animate with art inspired by classic 80s and 90s mecha anime and cartoons, like Gundam, Voltron, etc. ---

Month One: Research, Learning, Initial Ideation

In order to start making concept art for my game, I had to figure out what I wanted to create and how to actually draw it in that style.

To figure out what shows I wanted to have influence the concept art, I started rewatching a few episodes from each of the memorable mecha series  I watched when I was a kid. Over the course of the month, I ended up watching several episodes from the various shows in the Gundam series, Evangelion, Robotech, and Voltron. Additionally, I watched the ‘2017 Giant Robot Duel’ between the US and Japan for further influence. While watching all of these, I took note of which mechs I liked certain design aspects of, and later printed out pictures of them and put them on the wall near my desk.

I figured that having them on the wall near my desk would allow me to visually recall the mech easily, as well as serve as inspiration while ideating for my own robots.

As for how to actually create the concept art, one way I taught myself was that I managed to get a hold of a few books on how to draw in the style of anime/manga.

I used these books for references and tutorials towards the beginning of teaching myself the art style. Most of the tutorials were relatively easy and short, so I think a couple of the books may have been targeted more towards very-beginner artists. Once I felt I had a decent grip on the anime-style art that underlies the mecha genre, I went to Google and found some tutorials online on how to draw mecha. Unfortunately, not all of them were helpful, as many of them involved mostly just the artist drawing at an inhuman pace with little-to-no commentary or instruction. I did manage to find some helpful guides though, which are linked below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXWdzbC_46Ahttps://www.sketchbook.com/blog/how-to-draw-mechs-basics/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoP15ZfN1uwhttps://khallandra.deviantart.com/journal/Tips-and-Tricks-Mecha-Basics-564576627

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Month Two: Mech #1’s Ideation and Creation

Now it was time to make the concept art for the first mech in my game! I started off the process by sketching ideas for the mech’s head. 

After sketching those, I spent the next couple weeks brainstorming, and the ideas on these pieces of paper inevitably made the Wall of Inspiration.

Finally, I sketched out the first character in full. Although it looked rather simple, since it was one of the first times I’d ever really made a character this complex before from my own imagination, I had a lot of trouble with it. In addition to the overall difficulty of drawing something as complex as mecha, I kept erasing after I drew things, attempting to either redraw what I just drew to make it perfect, or to add something else I had just thought of while drawing the initial lines. In total, drawing that out took me roughly five hours, and I was really happy with what came out of that session. 

Pretty cool drawing right? I though so too. 

However, when I put the drawing into Illustrator during my next session, I became significantly less happy with it. Image Trace didn’t do it justice and wasn’t even workable, so I had to hand-trace it with the Pen tool, which took hours. As I was tracing over it with the Pen tool, it started to look cheesier and cheesier, which was worrying me. I felt like I was some teenager passing time making MS Paint art during computer class. 

About halfway through, I kept minorly tweaking small lines and the placement of small shapes in attempts to make it better. Despite these attempts, I couldn’t manage to make the mech look any better. I even gave it a couple of days and went back to it, still couldn’t do much with it, so I hoped for the best and colored it in. 

Overall, I think Mech #1 came out a lot better than I expected it to after giving it some color. I still am not super happy with it, and I like how the head looked in the second draft much better compared to how it turned out here. I think it came out okay, but something about it feels forced to me, like you could tell I was trying to use an art style that wasn’t really my own. I still can’t shake that ‘kid messing around in MS Paint due to boredom’ feeling every time I look at it, which actually really upsets me because of how much effort and time I put into it to make it specifically not come off like that. Finishing this mech taught me the most important lesson in art I’ve learned to date: imitating the style of others will only lead to output that doesn’t meet your expectations. I thought I learned this a long time ago with music, but I guess I needed a reminder session. 

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Month Three: Mech #2′s Ideation and Creation

My original plan for the last month of my constant output project was to animate the first mech I made, and put that robot into the game I was working on. I had been learning how to use Spine, a rigging animation software, for a couple weeks beforehand, and had even begun to work on animating Mech #1. However, shortly after, my team and I decided to sideline the fighting game in order to build on a separate prototype for a game we didn’t initially think of or expect to make. So, I decided that in order to continue working on the game in a productive manner, I should make more concept art, and animate both according to their finalized character move-sets when the project gets to that point. Also, I really wanted to give creating a mech another try, and I had an idea for a robot that I thought would be kind of cool. I felt like I tried too hard to imitate my influencers while making it, and that the resultant output was lacking because of it. 

For the second mech, I decided to design it mainly using my art style, while still taking minor design notes from the creators who influenced me to pursue this project in the first place. This time around, I had actually came up with the majority of the mech I wanted to make on the subway, so instead of repeatedly iterating on the various ways I could go with it like I did with the first design, I just went in and started drawing a draft of it. 

I wanted the next character I designed to be a tank-y powerful-yet-slow character, so I decided to go for a more sturdy-looking mech design. I also wanted to give the character powerful projectiles to make up for its slow movement speed, so I took note of Heavyarms from Gundam Wing and made one of the mech’s arms a gun, except instead of a gatling machine gun like Heavyarms, this character has a three-barrel laser cannon. I consciously decided to stop trying to overcomplicate the mech. The circle in the chest was meant as a way to shoot a ‘super-attack’ in the form of a massive laser beam.

This was the final sketch before I scanned it into Illustrator to edit next session. I decided against throwing in the chest-hole ultimately to both keep the semi-minimalistic aesthetic I was going for, and keep the design from being a bit too Pacific-Rim-y for my taste. (Side note: while the drawing was still in sketch form like this, one of my friends said that the laser cannon arm reminded him of three pieces of bundled chalk, and I still can’t unsee it.)

This was how Mech #2 looked after I finished tracing it with the Pen tool (Image Trace couldn’t get it close enough to right so I just went at it manually again). I didn’t change much on this design from the last step other than that I shortened the laser cannons (and reshaped them to look slightly less like chalk) and slightly changed the shape of the mech’s head. 

This is the final version of Mech #2. I really liked how this came out after being colored. It felt much more ‘me’ than Mech #1, and I felt like that shows through the design quality upon comparison. Only change to it other than the coloring (which was changed at least ten times before this image was exported) was that I added circles in the laser cannon so the cannons didn’t look like grey chalk (I couldn’t shake it). I can’t say enough about how much happier I am with this mech design than the first one. I hope that when I get around to doing the concept art for Mech #3 I like it as much as I like this one. 

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Conclusion:

So that’s what I did for my Monthly Output this semester! I really enjoyed learning to draw mechs, even if I wasn’t the biggest fan of my first design. I’ve always wanted to learn how to draw them, so this was a lot of fun for me to do. Learning a new art style is very difficult, and honestly I definitely have yet to master it. I guess that’s why the same studio has been making Gundam for 40+ years. I still feel like I have a long way to go until I get to the point of feeling comfortable putting my own designs in games I make, so these will probably stay as concept art to hand off to an illustrator for now. I’m really excited to keep at this. I may not be the Gundam animators yet, but I feel like I can hold my own a little bit now, which is way more than I could say at the beginning of the semester!