themes
Themes:
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The waterline:
- are you contributing? Or filling in for other people's mistakes
- Don't put people below the waterline
- it's cruel
- it's counterproductive: nothing get's better
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The great compromiser:
- reconciling different needs and interests
- need to know enough about both jobs to do them well
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"Watercolor"
- Boundaries are fluid, hard to delimit
- eg on State of Decay I designed the pipeline and also did production
- Boundaries are fluid, hard to delimit
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Renaissance man
- Not just because you know multiple things
- But also because you pioneer things — Ex: alberti and the history of perspective * discovered by tinkerers * popularized by systematizers * revolutionized the way art was made * "tips and tricks" * Craft and Theory are complimentary Combining both opens new doors Being a “Renaissance Person” isn’t enough Multi-skilled people make cool discoveries…. …but without a system, discoveries remain curiosities How do you liberate creative energies? Exploration followed by packaging Make the fruits of discovery available to the crafts-people
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process vision
- Seeing making stuff as a system, not an act — identify time wasters — identify one-way gates — fight for short, straight pipelines
- Negotiation does not work — "We just won't do that" is a lie * Phinney story * Moonrise story
- What works is designing the process right — simple — flexible — as linear as possible
- Example: level editing a shooter game — Socom vs TF2
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talent for abstraction
- Learn to see the visually significant cues that other artists see
- ... and translate them in to tech.
- Example: de-construct an image for the audience — glancing highlights — direct, indirect, specular, ambient etc — see contours and gradients as functions — see blend modes, etc
- Not about just knowing what knobs to pull — also knowing what to ask for
- Example: — "carved out of soap" — translate into: * soft contours * soft terminators * lots of mid tones
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tolerance for chaos
- Some engineers are "just so" people — don't like the boat rocked
- TAs are the opposite: — "Interrupt driven"
- Have to be able to deal with sudden chaos — psychologically * don't freak out * Ship sank? Build another! * example: - rebuilding hit boxes. — organizationally * good backlog * example: - good email reporting tools — technologically * good library of tricks up your sleeve * know how to use a roll of duct tape. * Example: Crytek files lib
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Good memory
- Somebody has to remember how things work — development is not linear or routine — we don't usually know how to do half of it — we imrovise and move on — god help us if we have to go back
- It's likely to be the TA (see "memory alpha") who remembers
- Documents fail — More tools, less process! — More tools, less documentation — if it can be automatic, it should be
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Guilds, secrecy
- medieval tradition — secretive — local — family based — inefficient!
- renaissance — formal — literary — repeatable!
- We constantly struggle between these two — guild life is actually kind of fun — it's tight, it's us-vs-them — it's also more secure * artists keeping secrets — But the open economy is vastly more efficient * cheaper * lower risk * no run-over-by-bus problem - 343 story — Moral Q: are we putting people out of a job? * No - if we could do it, so could somebody else * If we make things more streamlined we're making the people with us more valuable
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Innovation vs iteration
- Regular artists work best in iteration — try, view, judge, tweak, repeat
- TA's need to innovate — new ways to work — new ideas to look at — proof of concept
- These are complementary, but appeal to different people — TA = easily bored — Artists = hard to make them stop — innovators create a new process — iterators make it sing
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Department or not?
- I don't like departments
- but they can be a necessary evil — engineers / designers don't always want to hear from artists * "Lazy artists" story — It helps if the whole company knows that somebody is there to speak for the process
- OTOH the relationship between art and ta is special — if you're not close, it's not working — TA exists to make art more productive