I am currently making my first proper game and I recently started polishing it,
even though it isn’t finished at all yet
I just wanted to see how the outcome will be eventually and I noticed that I really like polishing the game.
As most indie developer I started as a programmer and only used “programmer” art in all of my projects
and it did never bother me at all but with this game it’s just different.
And so my question is if you are more of a programmer/coder type or a developer who enjoys this polishing stuff like me.
I like it, but I don’t like the time it takes. There is only so much time I can put into my hobby and often when i’m messing with uv mapping or something I really wish I was coding instead.
lol i polish all the time the whole time
kinda dumb really
i have a problem wanting to be perfectionist … i guess
ill take like 2-3 hours moving a ui element around ><
well like i was making a card’s layout and damnnn i took alotta time just moving little things around
really dumb lols ><
and basic mechanics not even begun lols
and i dont code anything until i have the final artwork done for it ><
but yeah id say im more artist, less coder
but i generally spend more time learning code since i feel its my weakness
… NEVER liked math class… doodled instead lol
needless to say … i have like 10 just begun projects … none even like 30 percent done
(keep getting different ideas lols)
… HOPEFULLY i can stick to my current project…
Polishing is not the favorite part of game development to me. Its takes a long time and there is a lot of redoing the things you already did but after the polishing is done its nice to see how much nicer your work looks.
I hate polishing. In all its forms. I work best when I have other people around that love polishing. I break the back of the problem, then hand it off to others to go through the minutiae.
That depends on what needs polishing. For example, some of the enemy animations in my current project glitch out when they die in one hit. They should fall straight over, but after getting knocked back they instead go through a walking animation before the dying animation kicks in. However, I find animation bugs can be amusing (c.f. the Spycrab in TF2), and it took me ages to even animate them in the first place, so I’m not really bothered with this.
However, if I can polish a mechanic such as projectile flight, I will try and do so.
I enjoy planning out complex systems at a high level, figuring out how to implement them, and feeling that rush as you see it in motion for the first time. I love extending these features and making them robust and reusable.
I hate positioning elements meticulously and figuring out why my lightmaps have seams in them. I do not enjoy trimming 3MB from a build to get it under 100MB. I really strongly dislike figuring out why my UI looks like butt in-game, when my Photoshop mockup looks so wonderful to me.
I’m definitely more of a starter than a finisher. But I’m trying to change, man. I’m really trying.
It’s odd really. At one time long ago I did spend a lot of time touching up graphics here and there. Probably as much time as I spent finetuning the programming.
These days I still finetune my design (game and technical) and programming (collisions, feedback, interaction and so forth) but I don’t spend much time at all on graphics iterations. I think for 2 reasons really: first I see more value in the underlying execution then how things look (from an art perspective) and second because even if I spent hours on something it will not look as good as a dedicated graphic artist could do in much less time… so basically is a waste of my time. Makes more sense to focus on what you are good at and make the rest “good enough” / barely passable.
Polishing the game is where you find all the stupid things you did and are now only realizing how bad it is.
Just like a carpenter, first you polish the brass handles, than you notice the hinges are dull looking and they need to be polished, now you have to polish the inside of the hinges as well and low and behold now you have to polish the inside of the cabinet wood; BUT you find where your screw cracked one of the shelves, now you have to redo a shelf, polish the shelf and now it does not look like the other two shelves so you have to redo them as well, than polish them and finally give it a wipe down once again…only to realize the gawd damn hinges are not the right hinges so you then replace the hinges with the correct ones, than polish them up and now the doors do not want to open all the way anymore, so you redo the doors so now they open and close but they close so hard you need to add something to ease their closing, finally you think your done when you look at the brass handles and now they don’t look right so you remove them for something better looking like gold plated handles, now the hinges don’t match…polishing a game can go on like this crap for many weeks to several months.
