Dana Callista Lexa 🏳️‍⚧️

indie game dev is just about cheating, always, all the time, whenever it saves you a headache. just constantly doing the most illegal stuff. wacko art styles, hacky one-off scripts, doors that are also tables that are also clouds... games combine 15+ creative disciplines into a single medium and you do not have enough lifespan to do things with propriety

ok ok ok, i thought of a good example of this i ran into recently!!

There's a certain boss fight in Bossgame that has a lot of story beats within the fight, like big plot points are happening, it's a climax of the story, everything is very important. this is pretty much the only fight in the game like this, every other mid-fight conversation is very minimal - characters only speak in one-sentence popups and yell short "battle quotes"

So basically i had NO way of portraying a complex plot mid-battle. I thought about possibly changing scenes to the standard "phone text cutscene" but that code would be a pain and it'd kill the pace. I thought about just doing dozens of the one-sentence popups, but that would take ages and wouldn't have the dramatic feel i was hoping for

SO, what i did: after beating phase 1, i made the boss spawn an empty object, which had a script that would spawn other objects on a timer. Then i had the boss pause its AI for ~55 seconds. the controller object spawns a giant solid black plane to hide the battle, and a bunch of image & text objects play directly over top the battle. the whole cutscene is all just weird one-off objects spawning over each other in sequence.

From there, i just winged the rest. Like, i couldn't really figure out how to convey who was speaking at first, until i realized I could just make massively size up the 48px character heads. i made everything slide around a bit for dynamism and damn, it just... came together. the cutscene is surprisingly complex for me just spawning things over top a battle (i think you can even still press character buttons during it...)

programming a battle cutscene manager would have been a pain to do for a single battle, so i just slapped it all together with gum and it worked!! in fact, i think the limitations inspired me to try some creative workarounds and helped me come up with ideas!! basically, sometimes hacking is great.

This may not be the answer you were anticipating, but: I wish I'd known that, by and large, you can pick a lot of it up as you go if you're good at self-learning.

I went into gamedev with, functionally speaking, my only coding experience being a single camp as a kid that taught me basic and visual basic. I'd messed around a little more with modding graal online, but realistically, to say I had "programming experience" would be misleading. I was an animator, pretty much ONLY an animator, who knew what a "goto" was, basically.

Late in development of clockwork empires it was becoming pretty clear that the art team's work was winding down but we needed more people to help work on the gameplay. Artists were handed books on writing lua and told to do a few chapters. As someone who has a particular penchant for how-to books, this was like lighting a match for me. I came back from this "learn how to write hello world" tutorial with, somewhat infamously, an app containing a physically-bouncing, flaming Monkey Island screenshot.

Things only escalated from there. I grabbed any bit of task I was even mildly interested in (I was interested in all of them) and ended up taking responsibility for more-or-less the entire economy balance, writing and scripting the full tutorial and "civilopedia", and a ton of in-game event work for Clockwork Empires. By the end of a few years I was doing all kinds of things in lua that probably should not have been allowed by law. And then gaslamp ended.

I took the opportunity being out-of-work to voraciously consume the entire unity tutorial suite in a week and then start working on my own clone of Tetris Attack, written mostly in C#. I ended up putting it on hold because of freelance work, but my job description has ended up becoming more and more amorphous over the years - for radial games I wrote entire gameplay prototypes myself, fixed bugs, whatever was needed. Once you know how to do such a large swathe of gamedev it's really hard to just say "not my problem" when an issue crops up. Maybe that's the fun of solo dev to some degree; it's hard not to feel fancy as hell when you can be an entire production team by yourself.

Anyway, now we come to my current job at ivy road, where I've leveraged my job as animation lead and my coding knowledge to basically become the queen of gameplay animation. Typically speaking, when I get an idea in my head of how I want something to look, it's my job to not just animate it but to put it into the game and make it feel the way I want it to feel, whether that's hand-tuning input timings and buffering, setting up procedural animation using curves and Blueprint (I will have so much to say about this after we launch), or even building out tools for other devs to simplify their intersection with my work.

None of this is what I trained for in school. I went to school for film animation. I trained how to make animations in maya and export them, and that's about it. The rest is sheer enthusiasm and a lot of internet searching, reading, and sometimes just trying different avenues to make something work, over and over, until one of them finally does. You can brute force a lot of technical skills just by being interested in doing something practical with them.

Anyway, that's the thing I kind of wish I'd known going into games. You don't have to pigeonhole yourself! I can be an animator-rigger-coder-designer-person rather than just one of those things, and flourish. And that's pretty great, IMO.

This was also my knee-jerk reaction, but somebody framed it to me more that pixel art is actually really expensive compared to using 3D models. Which is true -- look back 20 years to the Gameboy Advance, and that platform established pre-rendered sprites as something that was quick, cheap, and easy. Having a pixel artist paint a thousand frames of animation costs a lot more than just keyframing a single skeleton and then running an export script.

Like, look at Superstar Saga against Mario vs. Donkey Kong. MvDK has 2-3 times as many frames of animation as Superstar Saga, and it uses pre-rendered graphics for its sprites.

Iizuka even touches on this a little bit, noting how easy it is to attach cosmetics and change out skins entirely for a 3D model. If you wanted to give Mario there a new hat, you'd have to modify ~120 individual frames of animation, one by one. Whereas with a 3D model, you just remove the old vertexes and attach the new ones.

This is less "pixel art as a medium will be dead in ten years" and more "2D animation as a whole is less cost-effective than 3D animation." It's the same problem as Disney ditching ink and paint for CGI (it's just framed with pixel art, given Sonic Mania is still a fresh memory).

All of this is to say: it sucks, because 2D animation looks wonderful, pixel art looks wonderful, and these people need to stop thinking so much with their bank accounts. At the same time, though, as someone who is a Sonic fan and looks at basically every single game under a microscope, I'm not alone in saying the last 3-4 Sonic releases have felt very low budget. Even (and maybe especially) Sonic Frontiers. And Takashi Iizuka, despite being the head of Sonic Team these days, has spelled it out that he's still beholden to Sega's corporate whims and isn't actually allowed to make the games he wants the team to make.

Ergo, I can imagine the dude is looking to save a few bucks wherever he can, because he has to work with what he's given.

I'm speaking here as:

• Someone who has professionally done pixel art for games
• Someone who has professionally done rigging and 3d animation for games

"How expensive" an art style is is heavily, heavily depending on the production in question and its needs. Not just "are there alternate cosmetics" but stuff like:

• Do you need alternate angles, and how many?
• What kind of frame count are you going for for standard animations?
• How much bespoke art is in the game vs how much standardized art?

Generally speaking, 3d is very good at minor variations on a theme. Retextures, small outfit additions. 3d is very bad at bespoke additions. Pixel art, meanwhile, is expensive for very large, complex animated pieces and variations on large-frame-count anims but VERY cheap for bespoke additions.

Things you can do very cheaply in 3d art:

• Add props to existing characters
• Retexture existing characters
• Create new model variants for existing characters - as long as the body type is similar or identical
• Vary animations procedurally
• Have physics interactions
• Have many camera angles

Things you can do very cheaply in 2d art:

• Create wholly new assets/characters/animations extremely quickly
• Create sequences that would be complex and difficult to animate in 3d, like complex prop interactions, character-linked effects, etc
• Create games with a minimum of staff (the cost bar for pixel art is lower than 3d art at the low-budget end, due to 3d art's large wind-up cost - making and animating a single model requires at minimum 3 different disciplines. That sunk cost becomes lesser on larger productions that need huge numbers of assets per character)
• Create animations without worrying whether body mechanics are an issue or dealing with technical know-how for issues like gimbal lock

They're different mediums and they have different requirements and strengths. There is no hard rule about which one is going to be pricier, it's 100% needs-based.

I don't want to shoot the dog, but I do want to shoot the idea of having a dog in the game to pet.

I know, I know, it's pretty mean of me to pull out a gun and unload a full clip into a completely adorable and wonderfully intentioned little trend even if it IS a little bit annoying, and it's certainly kind of an overreaction, but while I've got this gun out and you're listening would you mind if I made a particular hyperspecific point? I take issue with the idea of putting a dog in the game to pet because I think that's missing the point: if you have a dog in a game, you should be able to pet it.

Do you understand the distinction? The only reason for asking "Can You Pet The Dog?" is because the dog, when present, doesn't give the player any way to interact other than what the player normally has, usually gun. Gun is not the ideal way to interact with dog, and developers tend to forget pet but remember gun because petting a dog doesn't do anything. For player's that's exactly the whole point, that there is no point, and that's kind of mindblowing to me. Like, I spend all day every day trying to make a big digital stage and trick people into believing it's real, and they laugh at your antialiasing and say you need to upgrade your version of the Unreal Engine, and then they'll go on to ask why they can't pet a dog. Isn't that funny? They think they see all the fakeness and seams but at the end of the day the human brain is not immune to seeing a picture of a dog and going " doggie :)"

My best friend and streaming partner Fern loves Bloodborne and Souls games more than anything, and one of her favorite things about these games is the ability to wave and gesture at people. They put emotes in those games because of multiplayer, but you can do them whenever you want. Wave to the Silver Knight shooting arrows at the pillar right in front of you. Wave to the boss through the fog door. Wave to the fire keeper—wait she waved back!

You can't "pet the dog" in Bloodborne (dogs in these games are made of knives, unsafe to pet) but you can "pet the dog" (the doll giggles when you act goofy, like a teenager trying to get a girl to notice her). This fake, inanimate world responds back to the player's attempt to communicate with it, even when there is absolutely no mechanical reason to do, an act of communication between player and world that is delighting in and of itself.

This is the spirit, rather than letter, of petting the dog. It's not about a literal dog that you literally pet. You can find a way to put a dog in the game and you can figure out a way to pet it, but it's not very impressive. What I would like to see is identifying what in the game the player wishes they could interact with, simply for its own sake, just because they believe in the game, believe in it more than you who made it does, and want the game to speak back in a way that validates that belief. That is a much harder dog to pet. But isn't the whole point a lot of work for no real point?

Speaking of, while I've got this gun, I feel the exact same way about fishing minigames. A calming and idle pastime in the middle of a very different kind of game is a great idea, but I think you should pick one that suits what your game is about. Yes, Cruelty Squad does have fishing in it, but the real fishing in Cruelty Squad is the stock market. Think about that while I lower my gun and give you a chance to flee.