Still exploring my interests, I’ve come to a point where I can see a distinction between art and games. I feel that I’m artistic and want to express artistically, and that in pretty much every project I’ve ever worked on in Unity it is always the ‘artsy’ part that I really like/want while the other technical bits are less interesting. I like the art parts but then, when it comes down to level building, making puzzles, adding challenges, that all feels a bit empty and repetitive. I’ve been wondering if I should switch from games to just make some kind of interactive art thing, or something. I sort of don’t quite resonate with the 'gotta have a mission, gotta have a challenge, gotta entertain someone, gotta have obstacles and stuff to 'do’kind of mindset.... I seem to relate more to theart for art’s sakesort of approach. But I also know some games are more artsy than others. Like there are exploration games that are beautiful and just let you roam around having a kind of 'experience' without all kinds of goals and challenges andthings to do. I was almost going to make screensavers at one point because they didn't appear to have to have major goals and constant 'action'. I appreciate beauty and I enjoy the depth and abstraction of coming from an artistic place, so still have some sense of not fittingwith games. My motivations seem to flow more into a sort of more passive, less involved direction. Anyone else like this? Any insights? Can there be games that are art or some other interactive experience that is more heavily artistic than justthe graphics are nice`?
I think quite a few people are the same way yet they don’t come right out and say it like you just did. Kudos for that.
I’m kind of at the opposite side. While I could easily get lost working on just the graphics, sounds and music (truly a person can easily spend hours per day on such things and not get bored)… the interaction and dynamics of the game-play itself along with the software engineering to bring it all alive are the art to me.
You definitely need to do what you have a passion for. If you have no real interest in games and have a lot of interest in art then focus on art. You clearly must want to create something or you probably wouldn’t be here.
Have you considered creating art assets that game devs can use? Or joining a small team where you focus on the art and someone else focuses on the game using your art?
I like the art part too. Thank goodness I have a couple of programmers to do the other parts. I just wish I had more of me since I am trying to do much of everything. lol
I’m sure it can, that “hot” game or whatever it’s called is quite minimalistic and looks / plays well. Thing is, there are tons of boring repetitive jobs in games… There is an any job I’ve ever been in ever.!
You ultimately can’t escape it, but you do get a warm fuzzy feeling when it all starts to come together. It makes all the slog worth it…
I occasionally flip-flop between wanting to focus on art more than engineering, and engineering more than art. At one point when I had a tendency to do more art, and still wanted it to be a game, I considered doing a visual novel, since that is highly focused on content rather than gameplay. I liked Ren’Py* when I was evaluating it, and was enthusiastic about producing art in a story format, with some level of gameplay/animation. I admit though, this never got past the evaluation/prototyping stage, so my words are worth a grain of salt, but I think it’s an outlet to unleash the artistic side while staying in the gaming realm.
- If you’re unfamiliar with Ren’Py, it was mainly created for anime dating/romantic visual novels, but I was seeing beyond that, and wanted to write a sort of interactive sci-fi story/game. Also, it’s not limited to just dialog trees, etc. The framework allows for a lot more gameplay elements than just that.
I do recall having those moments of it feeling good to see something working (finally) and that feedback… i seem to have a shorter attention span for needing some feedback or evidence that things are getting better… although sometimes getting to that point is a boring slog with bugs and technical issues. On the flipside sometimes a blank canvas on which to create a game can seem daunting, it’s totally empty and everything left still to do, nobody to tell you what must be there and not sure what to put there.
Cool, so why not start off small and fun for now… Get your fire back and start discovering why you wanted to make games in the first place…
I think a lot of long term dev’s have been through this IH, some times thinking about two weeks of nothing but UV mapping causes me to not even boot the computer up and let the minions run wild… Which I shouldn’t.
After a few very interesting threads that you opend and I didn’t quite “get” this one heavily resonates with me. I feel very similar, not quite knowing where I belong and what I should do. When I was still in school I got into programming and while I liked it I felt I wouldn’t have the patience for bug fixing to persue that path as my job later in life. I had the impression that as a programmer I’d spent a great deal of my working time with hunting bugs and that scared me off. For a while I thought 3D graphics artist would be my calling and while still in school I tried a few programs but never really got a project done. I was over-ambitious and under-achieving and also got discouraged from that path. I chose to become a 2D artist because I felt I can get a picture done a lot quicker that way and the feedback is more direct. You don’t have to spend a few weeks coding before you see results and the progress feels less artificial than building a 3D model from scratch. You have to keep in mind that that was 10 to 15 years ago, where tools like zBrush didn’t exist and the whole process was a lot more cumbersome.
I ended up studying graphics design and have been working as a freelance 2D artist for about 10 years now, but in hindsight I’d say I made the wrong choice. I hadn’t factored in that in painting you never are really “done”. Every picture could always be better. And as someone who is better at analyzing faults than creating a less faulty product, I end up in the situation of disliking almost every picture I ever painted. Then put that in a situation where you need to deliver on deadline and the budget is fixed and you have to balance the time you can put into an image against how long you can afford it to take and how much more you’d want to “fix” or redo in the image and you end up with quite the dilemma. And don’t get me started on what client requests sometimes mean to an artist.
What draws me towards programming is that I have a MUCH greater chance of feeling “done” with programming tasks. And it is much easier to gauge whether or not you succeded at something or made it better. I don’t like math, but I like things that can be expressed in numbers. I worked on an iOS game for a long time and feature creeped and optimized it to death (literally). I was surprised at how much I actually enjoyed performance optimization, because at the end I had a very tangible result that could be expressed in numbers. I also enjoyed polishing tasks like programming a little glow effect that complimented the animated pre rendered (for performance) particle effect that every laser hit left on a target. Little time investment for a very tangible result that I found to clearly improve the product. I rarely feel moments like that in painting.
I’ve had my game at a point where aspects where polished way beyond what I’d need for a release but I somehow forgot to make it a full game and take care of “boring” stuff like a singleplayer campaign structure. It was at that point that I realized the difference between gamedesign skills and programming skills.
So I’ve analyzed what I’m good at and what I suck at and came to the conclusion that the type of game I’d need to work on - if I ever do it again - would need to have procedurally generated levels, little to no story and little stuff that I need to laboriously create by hand. And I’m still stuck on the empty-canvas stage. As soon as I started working on it, I got lost in superficial stuff like post fx shader programming etc. and I felt I need to start over and get the dreaded “game” part out of the way first and save the fun stuff for later. “Only cubes till I can play it and have the major mechanics implemented” I told myself. Then I got lost in playing around with physics simulation on cubes and this is where I’m now. Still no game in sight, still unsure where my place is. 3D art probably would suit me better, but it seems to be a market that doesn’t suite people at my 3D skill level and lack of portfolio. Meaning the work that would interest me goes either to big outsourcing studios or is done inhouse and I want to stay a freelancer.
So where does that leave us, because I feel like I have almost arrived at the same place as you. I even briefly considered making screensavers like you said. You seem to come from the programmer side and are looking towards art with similar things on your mind as are on mine. However I come from the artist side, arriving at the same place. You would have to make your own judgement after trying it, but for me the answer didn’t lie in artistic work. Your milage may vary.
To briefly touch on making games again and why I still am drawn to that… Games are almost the only thing I have a bit of passion for. And working on that iOS game that I in the end lost interest in, I was at a time the most passionate in my entire life. I’m hoping to reach that point again, but so far I didn’t get that feeling back and I fear that the magic of breaking into a new field, and achieving things I never did before, was what motivated me in those days and I’d have to break into an entirely new field to get that again.
My take on the gamedesign aspect is, if I can create something that someone as jaded as myself and as critical of my own work can enjoy, then there has to be at least a niche audience for that game. That is no approach I’d bet a big budget on though, so I try to stay as (cost) efficient as I can. Or just keep procrastinating on the forum and never get a game done…
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about this. I expect there are others to struggling in the same way. Procedural generation also interests me although the technicalities of it being so programming-based puts me off a bit… not in terms of capability but it’s just very intellectual.
After reading what you said I kind of got a glimpse of some insight… that maybe I do want to make games but I want to do it very artistically, and that doesn’t entirely gel with the usual process. This might mean throwing a tonne of rules out the window and just innovating the crap out of it. I mean, that’s kind of what art is I think… expressing fresh and new rather than just following the rules. I like getting outside of the box. But what scares me is nobody else ‘getting’ the end result.
This sounds promising and I wonder if you started on that path yet. Did it help to overcome the blank-canvas-problem?
Sort of, sort of not. I’m still trying to find out what I want to do. It may not be game related at all.
whats … crappy… is that Ive ALWAYS wanted to make video games, as a little kid, id doodle and draw levels, list items and weapons and stuff like that in my notebooks, man i made alotta paper games and play em with friends in the lunchroom, as I grew up … I always kept doing that, I made games in RPG Maker (didnt finish em, and deleted em) … modded TONS of games, all i really did with my life is mod games lol… but I always thought that, to make video games is kinda a LAME thing to do with my life … like a wussy lame little kids career … or something… I wanted to be an inventor or make some science breakthrough or something EPIC like that lol…
but i found specific inspirations…
I don’t think that games can truly be considered art until someone can create a “game” that is nothing more than a white screen and sell it for $3,000,000.
But no, joking aside, I think that the art world is definitely lacking in steps forward. It took Banksy forever to get a foot in as a serious artist because of all the postmodernists and party-personality-artists (cough! (Warhol) cough! cough!) selling pieces that are clearly the artist taking a piss. Literally, in Warhol’s case.
I think that interactive art is a great realm of possibilities, but is paved with criticism from the standing community who don’t want to admit that the emperor has no clothes, and that that lump of melted aluminum is in fact just a lump of aluminum and not a “representation of processed meat as a metaphor for…”
Uh…
Honestly, can’t remember what drivel that artist claimed her piece was about.
Now a giant fountain in Millennium Park with interactive faces that spits water, that’s at least something that hasn’t been done before.
When the iPhone market emerged Apple had a tutorial project that ended in an app with a white screen. Then someone took that, called it “Flashlight App” and put it on the appstore. If my memory serves me correctly he earned at least 500000$ with it.
Ha!
Well, there you go.
Nice idea, let’s change the white to other colors and call it a party app 
Then, add some music, code up some input requirements, and splash on a lot of feedback - you’re on your way to a rhythm game. 
Gigi
Are we still talking about games or interactive art?
If you want to make an arty game, I think it works better when the gameplay is simple.
I think I might have something of the same perspective as you, in that I don’t play games in order to achieve anything except an experience, a feeling or an emotion. I sometimes peruse the internet for hours just to find a screenshot of a game that captures my imagination. I have a folder of images that I’ve downloaded, and I have to say that many of these games, despite the fact that I’ve never played them, mean more to me than most of those that I have. In fact I sometimes think that I don’t want to play them because they’d probably ruin the idea that I have about them. The only game that has really managed to pull off both the emotional experience and the gameplay at the same time was Homeworld 2.
The point is, for me, even if a game gives me a few moments of the feeling I want, it is worth it. Whether it has 10 minutes or 10 hours of content is not very relevant. In fact, I usually prefer short games because they don’t wear out the experience just for the sake of more content.
This is something I’ve been trying to understand lately. I started a thread a while ago that had to do with whether or not cutscenes were a good idea, and I argued they weren’t and still feel strongly that this is the case. But it is definitely true that what I want from a game isn’t really the gameplay itself but an emotional experience. I think the issue I have with cutscenes is not so much that they’re bad but that they put the gameplay to shame, so that returning to the game is a bit of a disappointment. What I liked about Homeworld 2 was the way that the cutscenes were not competing with the gameplay, they involved narrative and abstract, still shots rather than simply continuing gameplay perspective but with better graphics and no player input.
What I do like in game art, and I really don’t understand why more attention isn’t paid to it, is cleanliness and simplicity. Being a sci fi fan, there is so much greebled crap out there, even in games like Star Citizen. I think some of the Halo games have the best art I’ve seen and while definitely there is a lot of attention to detail, the textures are very clean and greeble-free, and the colors are unsaturated. Heres an example of one of my favourite screenshots:
But anyway, my biggest problem with games in general is that when I see some really nice art, I want to interact with it, but the interaction is pretty much always a disappointment for some reason, so I think that a really good art experience might even benefit from less interactivity (like screensavers you mentioned). I’ve been thinking to myself lately that endless runners are a perfect platform for art (at least the kind I like). The speed and movement gives a sense of purpose and allows the art to develop itself in space and time and tell its story, and importantly doesn’t allow the player to interact with it too closely but only see each part briefly. And the gameplay can be extremely simple and not too distracting and even benefits the experience this way.
The threat is about whatever you want it to be about… but yeah, art vs games, art in games, art as games, etc…
Endless runners - potentially a nice way to flow through some artistic material I guess… but aren’t these usually kind of fast paced where you don’t get time to appreciate?
What I like about art and about the screenshot you posted, is that it has artistic qualities… the composition, the balance of color, the meaning of where objects are positioned, how it all works together to create an atmosphere and story without any time being involved, how the textures have quality etc… all contributes to an ‘appreciation’ where it’s somehow radiating a kind of glow of loveliness, or something… that makes you want to just take it in and be lifted to some transcendental place. You take that, then you suddenly portion off part of the image and attach it to a control scheme, and give it chores to do and obstacles to avoid, and stuff to ‘distract’ the player, and it kind of takes away from that tranquility and awe. Like… you don’t get time to stop and smell the roses.