I started this thread mostly for fun,and for the reason because in the last few weeks i’ve been kind of ,addicted" to game developing.
I’m not talking about speding countless hours in front of the PC developing,i’m talking about funny moments which have happened to me in ,real-life".
This addiction started when I was taking a walk a few weeks ago,and as passing by a street lamp(nothing unusual about it),i started thinking about the polycount of it,the textures…it just came into my mind!
One day,I was sitting on a bench near a tree in the mornin’,and I saw the tree’s shadows and I remember saying “Nice real-time shadows”…
Now,what was your funny game dev addiction moment,if you’ve had one?
when i play some games like runescape and C+C and stuff i sometimes mentally reverse engineer eg that can be done with colliders that is GUI rect ect lol
Game development like any professional pursuit, means that consuming the end product of other people, i.e. “playing other people’s games” means that it is actually work. After a few decades of this, you can become quite intolerant of “bad games.” You start taking apart how something was done, why it was done, what made the designer, artist or programmer choose that particular solution. I have seen this in writers where they are dissecting other people’s work; also in film directors, in architects, in artists, in actors (the good ones), in musicians (good ones again).
You learn as much from studying other people’s work as you do from pursuing your own endeavours.
Playing games, for game developers, is actual work!
I think a lot of us do this all the time. See the shadows of a tree leaf shimmering on the ground and think that it needs a higher shadow resolution.
Look like an idiot walking around a tree repeatedly trying to decide if a particular knot would have to use geometry or if a normal/parallax shader would be enough.
Spent all morning in a boring meeting staring at the speckled table deciding what combination of noises, blends and limits would replicate it in a procedural Substance. Then deciding if it would be best to split the edges into a separate material to get the wood texture in there, or if I could get away with cleverly unwrapping it to use just one texture. Finally decided on a custom shader that would take 2 textures and switch between them based on if the U coordinate was > 1 and just offset all the wood portions by 1 unit.
Every game I play I look at the quality of art. I walk by and go. ‘pssh. I can model that smug face’ and walk on, this happens too much in WoW xD. playing with other game devs is fun on skype, all you hear is my friend go ‘This texture is stretched omg!!!’ all the f***ing time!.
Its nice having more knowledge when your playing games, the more you are aware the more inspiration you get. I usually take a lot of notice of buildings in RL when im walking around, I love looking at architecture then mimicking it when im modelling.
Lol, Honestly I think this is hilarious and do this ALL THE TIME!
when you stop in the middle of games to admire a nice Specular - Bump texture, what could be improved, and literally everything ranging from how they coded it, to different things they could’ve used graphically. I even observe poly counts and very small objects and what shaders e.t.c.
Also, when you wonder how long it would take to bake (Lightmap) your backyard
When I saw a hot girl I asked her, “Hi there, I am studying how to rig female breasts by combining bones and physics to make them look nature. Would you let me play with them for a while to see how they move?”
-You find yourself thinking about the distance between your transform and everybody elses.
-You see something moving and wonder how many frames it’s animation would be in Unity.
-You re-enact spellcasting animations when there’s nobody around.
I think life is never boring anymore! We are really seeing life from another angel now…how beautiful old and stressed buildings are (what great textures), how many polys would I need to replicate this object or person for a game etc. But comparing nature with games I must say: what a great artist made this world…just the programming sucks sometimes
