Technically my project started in 2009 after I came back from Belgium, after the 2008 financial crisis took my studio with it. Since I’m caraibean, I tried to make the once in a lifetime game that would represent aspect of my culture, it was supposed to be a 3d action game inspired by zelda, based on idea that matured since 1995 when I was in school. I figured out it would take me 5 years to finish the project.
I decided to start with a less ambitious project, basically sonic meet mario galaxy, but the movement and camera system prove to he hard to solve. After 3 years, I solved it and moved on, canceling the project and going back to the initial plan.
Around 2012, I started concepting the current. But since it’s culturally base, tuning the story was a key pillar, it proved to be harder than initially thought. But by 2014, I had a detailed outline that was good enough. I didn’t wrote the story with gameplay in mind initially, because I’m confident in my designer skill, once it’s done it’s just an adaptation job.
I started exploring artstyle for a year, learning 3d on my own, I was targeting low end phones such as the mali 400 as a basis. Inspired by the old short “meet buck”, which was a student school project, I was going for a painterly no lighting style, something people would now say arcane like or spiderverse like, but before their time.
But I hit a big time realization while doing so, in the caraibe, there is black people like the main character, and while studying how to render them, I realized most 3d render are very bad approximation, both for hair and skin. I studied skin rendering and hair rendering in depth, then I studied the skin and hair appearance on people, trying to document what was missing.
Skin proved to be easier, but hair, I mention specifically 4c hair, there was no prior work on the technical level, nobody actually know anything about that type of hair. Most discussion about that hair run in circles, they discuss results, the what, but there is no ‘how’ on a technical level, it’s like building a car from the point of view of the visual design but knowing nothing about how you actually fold the carcass and construct the engine.
There is no way I can do a game base on a culture, if I can’t represent people of that culture. Especially my own culture. I realized quickly that it would be a much bigger challenge that I can entertain, given the initial scope. I lowered the ambition of the project from open world action rpg, to a 3d visual novel with floating camera. The quality of representations was non negotiable.
This format decreased the complexity of the execution, and allow to focus on the character’s rendering issue, which is now semi realistic, for usual sequence, and various, but close, animated style for the dungeon sequences, which make sense given the story.
Therefore I set out to explore the various problems, since it only need to be solved once for everyone. It took me 5 years to understand key aspects, and since then, I set out to innovate, to make it easier to address one of the major aspect. I end up creating a new classification of hair to capture the key aspects. I’m still in the process of solving that one major aspect.
In total it’s been around 10+ years, the latter year has been hard because math isn’t aspirational 
, people don’t understand it like a nice image. I’m working on hair, but there will be no render as long the equation is not solved. AND I’m not good with math, I use artist interpretation of the problem, broke into smaller problems, then Google the closest equivalent to each issue in sequence :p, but I’m also aware finishing it might have massive rewards, for rendering in general, not just hair. I’m maybe 3 steps away from the end.
Basically, the more uncertainty a project have, the more meandering it will be. I have a quadrant tools, with innovation (uncertainty) on one axis, and executive ambition on the other:
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Low ambition, low innovation, these project are easy to plan and execute,
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High ambition low innovation these are hard to execute, but planning is straightforward. You can reduce executive grind by spending time figuring tools. It doesn’t REALLY count as innovation, because it’s non blocking, as you have workflow fallback, any innovation will either increase quality or reduce time, not stall the project, thus these are always good to pursue.
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high innovation low ambition. These are those I call ‘artistic ambition’, they can be avant garde. The issue is that, even though the execution is easy, they are hard to plan ahead, the process of figuring things out takes time. That’s the headache or starving artist corner. In term of production, tools hat help narrow down the vision, by bringing structure, is key, iterations replace typical waterfall planning.
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The final quadrant is the march of death, high ambition AND high innovation. Typically, you don’t want to be there, that’s a disaster in the making, even if you survive this, you won’t be intact, that’s the worse of everything.
My project started slightly in the high ambition low complexity quadrant, that was basically just grind. I reduced ambition, by shifting the style to ‘painterly and no lighting’ initially, to make it possible. But the appearance of hair and skin issues, after the visual test, increased drastically the innovation needed, that put me in March of death. Therefore I lowered the ambition, because of the innovation needed, ending up in the headache corner such as, when the innovation is solved, I can treat myself with easy and smooth execution.
