Forem: Errant Signal Games

Developing My Style

Errant Signal Games — Sat, 07 Nov 2020 04:50:12 +0000

Just to get down to brass tax (tacks?, taqs???), here's my twitch and twitter, which I've been using to share streams of art and pieces I've done. I try and keep the content relevant, but I also discuss what's going on in my nursing career and my daily life.
I love learning about the lives others are living on a day-to-day basis, hopefully folks here have the same interest in mine!

Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/themaninadress
Twitter: https://twitter.com/errant_games

So What Am I Working On?

I set out to build a video game, right? Yes, I did!
So where's the game? Well...here's the thing...

I love art, I love animating, I love film and I love story telling. For me, video games are a way to tell stories through a player (or players') interactions with the medium. So the core of my interest in game design is the same as that of everything else: Storytelling.

I'm learning how much I love creating art and creating assets, and while I've mentioned this in earlier blogposts here on dev.to, I've really been diving deep. I'm taking classes, I'm practicing, I'm streaming my art and talking about it; trying to generate an online presence so people can see what I'm making and tell me what they think.

And so this is what I've been up to...

This is the sort of work I've been pumping out. I usually complete a few pieces a week. I'm focusing on developing specific skills. How does clothing rest on the body? How does hair move in the air? These studies have accelerated me along a path of success I had been hoping to cultivate and should have been trying to cultivate sooner.

And I'm sticking with it. I never say a lot here, writing long form is taxing for me because I think so much faster than I type. But if you're interested in what I'm working on day-to-day, jump into one of my late night streams or add my twitter to your social media. I'm always looking for new inspiration or to bask in the glow of other peoples' awesome content as well, so please send along any recommendations for artists, developers or other content creators that you yourselves adore.

Cheers and beers!

An Explosion of Thought

Errant Signal Games — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 17:13:47 +0000

It's been a while since I wrote, which I've already forgiven myself for. The last thing I wanted to do when I began this journey toward game design (specifically) and general design (less specifically), was lose myself in the work of commenting on my work.

A Little Bit of Background

I've been a writer for a long time. I wrote fan fic way back in high school and my own short stories here and there. Eventually, I began writing with the intent of world building, striking out into my own creative endeavors and as I matured further, I began using my writing to try and communicate with the rest of the world.
This is ironic considering I've never published anything and have rarely publicized any of my work (I dare you to try and find something of mine; I'll wait).

But it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I went back to the drawing board, so to speak, and began to really learn how to write. I began studying story structure and the various ways we communicate our thoughts, feelings and perspective to others.
And in my journey toward being a game designer and developer, I began exposing myself to a broader horizon of communicative tools.

A New Toolbox

I built a computer recently, for the first time. I made enough money on a recent nursing contract in New York, working with Covid-19 patients, that I was able to build something robust, future proof. The machine does anything I need, and I began taking full advantage of this. I acquired software and hardware to suit my interests and began learning what I needed to do build toward a career as a game designer and developer.

This computer's capabilities made media art a real possibility for me. Podcasting, animation, music, storyboarding, drafting, etc, all of it was available to me know so long as I studied.

I've always loved drawing and while I've had barely any formal training, I had been practicing more and learning from the internet in recent months. I've always had a fascination with Japanese anime, and the diminished focus on realism in hand-drawn animation appealed to the lazy student within me.

As a result I began dabbling in animation with the intent of marrying my writing skills and experience with my intense focus on the design and implementation of limited animation.
So I began looking for inspiration and guidance. This led me to older anime like Lupin III and Princess Mononoke, titles I grew up with. I'd always been a fan of Studio Ghibli and the anime of the 70's - 90's, though I had never had much exposure to the mature mainstream anime market of the post-2000's. As a result I'm not familiar with what anime eventually became, and remained in the past, before computers took over the job of animating and you could still see the work of real pencils and ink in the medium itself.

After learning a bit about Adobe Animator and the rest of the suite, I decided eschewing technology in favor of the tradition I was familiar with was a bad idea. I began studying Animator and Plastic Animation Paper and creating my own work.

I fell in love with animating instantly, so I took to redoubling my efforts to learn art and expand my skill. I felt a rush every time I completed a little project and even reviewing my frames got me excited about the prospect of bringing my stories to life.

Soon I turned back to anime studies. I began learning more about Satoshi Kon, who worked on Perfect Blue, Millennial Actress, Paranoia Agent and others throughout his long career in Japanese animation. I've always been a long time fan of the American political drama The West Wing, and so I began a study of its characters to create a lineup of anime versions.

While I'm not happy with the work I produced, completing it inspired me to continue honing my skills and developing my own style. I've been studying anime further through Christina Wu's course on Udemy, completing structure studies recently that will help me develop my sense of self as an artist.

I finished Yukiko after learning a bit more about how to manipulate and apply color in Photoshop CC, but was unsatisfied with certain features (like the eyes, which are admittedly better than Toby Ziegler's in the above West Wing tribute series), and ashamed of having to hide hands and avoid feet.
So I moved toward the specific studies Christina's course offers, and am very happy with the results.

So What's the Lesson?

I was intimidated by game design in general because I felt trapped between two choices: Make the entire game yourself or somehow dupe a team of people into working with you and doing all the work.

The former seemed impossible and the latter seemed distasteful. I've never asked anyone to work for free and I don't intend to. Because I started as a writer, and one of my driving motivations for game design is storytelling and the crafting of experiences for others, I decided that the best place to start then was in skills that allowed me to convey my stories in ways other than the written word.

And so, I'm focused on animating. I want to write scripts and make short films and learn to build my own sense of style, rather than rely on others to draw that all together for me. Eventually I will still have to put in the time programming my games, but by the time I'm ready to tackle that challenge I will have a wealth of work behind me showing others that I can be relied on to have something of value to contribute to my vision aside from the vision itself.

I knew this journey would be a slow one, so I'm doing my best to savor it.

Finish What You Start

Errant Signal Games — Sun, 09 Aug 2020 14:23:57 +0000

I am learning to love the feeling of finishing my work

I always struggled with seeing things through growing up; a bad habit that followed me into adulthood. I have started any number of projects (big and small) in my life that I've never finished. My favorite example is a project car I bought in 2012 that I never really got on the road and eventually gave away by the time I moved to Georgia this year (2020).

We start a lot of things in life and the last thing we want is for the only thing we finish to be the life itself. At least it's the last thing I want for myself.

This is partly why jumping into game design is scary for me: I'm clever and accomplished enough that if I fail at design/development it will 100% be because I chose not to finish what I started here. Being responsible for your own success is alluring. Being responsible for your own defeat is terrifying. But it's a dichotomy I'm tired of running away from. Design is not going to be my next project car.

Which brings me to this

I comprehend (the thesis of my last post) this code, but most importantly I completed the game that it was written for. It was a crappy platformer featuring a dragon that jumps and shoots fire, but it's complete and exists and I'm proud of myself for that.

What I enjoyed most about that project was how my comprehension of the details and the hard work allowed me a minimal amount of freedom to add my own details and make some of my own decisions. Instead of the fireball sprite Jason Weimann found online and used, I found an image and made my own sprites. Jason's dragon shoots fireballs, mine shoots lightning bolts. Jason's dragon shoots every time it jumps, mine jumps and shoots independently.
Jason's music track is fun and light, mine is dense battlemusic with beating drums and great crescendos that's far heavier than the cute graphics and high-pitched jumping sound effects would suggest.
I made decisions that made my game more mine than someone else's, and I finished the project after nearly 8 hours of work on it. (Not all at once).

What feels best about this experience is that I feel ready to take on the next one. I just have to figure out what that next one will be. For now, I will be working through a 3 part series on C# and .NET that I found on Udemy a while back. I really want to take advantage of the comprehension I've developed for coding and delve into the gritty details of programming before moving forward again.

Comprehension Is Key

Errant Signal Games — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 14:29:33 +0000

Coding is a lot like building a box or working some other piece of furniture

We can all envision six sides of wood and the nails that hold them together, but so long as we're not actually working the wood ourselves, we can miss out on so many crucial details.
Do we miter our edges so that angled cuts of each side can meet more neatly? Will we glue all walls but the box's opening in order to provide more stability? Should we go with the dark stain or something lighter?
But before then even: Is it more important that the box be cheap, or strong? Are we making one, or many? How many materials do we need? Do we have all the equipment?

Details are important because while some of them won't hold you back (like the color of the stain), others certainly will (do we have enough wood?) and it's crucial that we suss out which details are which.

This is where understanding can be the biggest struggle for new programmers like myself. To date, I have completed roughly a dozen tutorials on Unity and C#, Unreal Engine 4, programming in C++, Java, HTML and a couple others I've forgotten. And yet it wasn't until just the other day that I worked through a tutorial that I actually remembered.

Jason Weimann, who has credentials longer than my name, produced this tutorial early this year, taking new programmers through a series of steps toward understanding not just C# and Unity, but programming and game design in general.

Whereas before I had barely understood what tutorials were showing me, Jason's video left me grinning at every turn because for the first time I was comprehending the code I was writing.

Unity as an engine is relatively easy to understand. There is a GUI that your eyes can relate to myriad other things if you have ever touched a computer before, and it's far easier to connect the various inputs and outputs (when I turn this off, that happens). The coding aspect is different, it's abstracted from the actual game you're creating, and runs in the background.
I found myself pouring over my own code just to read it again, high on the fact that I was comprehending what I was reading. I could take liberties with my own code because I was understanding enough to piece it all together.

Others have shaken their heads at the idea of a "Eureka!" moment, and while I want to eschew this as a universal experience for new coders, I must confess it certainly felt like one to me.

So why did it finally click?

What factors came together to help promote my comprehension of written code? I have struggled even with graphical coding interfaces like PS4's Dreams (an astounding program if you own a PS4 you owe it to yourself to buy this software), because wrapping my head around the coding mentality was a struggle itself.

Now, I'm still no expert. Thinking to code for me has come to mean being able to "think beneath the reality in which I live." Running and jumping are no longer as black and white as they once were. Now they are forward movement and balance and gravity and force. Because with coding in games we are crafting the reality by which the player will live their experience, we have to understand what the builder's mentality is.

And to this, I credit several things. First and foremost, Jason's tutorials are informative in a way that few others have been. He knows what new coders do not know, and he remembers what it was like to be a new coder himself. He did not forget the questions and confusions he endured when he first got started. As a result, he knows exactly what pace a lot of us think and move at starting off.

Secondarily, I credit my own father. He was a carpenter when I was a kid, and taught me a lot about woodworking that a lot of people simply don't know or understand these days. Learning to transplant that knowledge and experience over to coding helped a lot when I was looking at Jason's guidance.

Thirdly, I have to credit myself. When I was trying to learn to make games before, over the passed few years, it was always with a stark lack of conviction. I was still dealing with nursing school, trying to make something of my Guard career (my active duty years were not the most productive), raising children, and struggling to be the husband my wife needed me to be.

Where This Leaves Me

Now, I am in a much better place. I am a working professional, I'm no longer making my military career a needless priority**, and my children are growing up before my very eyes and I know them well. I still struggle in my relationships, as do we all, but I am in a place where I can make design the passion of my daily life, and so when I sit down to learn something, I'm not doing it because I managed to find an hour here and there and want to distract myself from the rest of it all. I'm doing it because I'm wanting to thrive in my own passions.

The Game I Made

It's an Angry Bird clone. Very simple, very unpolished, but I can explore the code and the structure behind the game and understand every bit of it. I even found myself figuring out work-arounds to certain issues before needing to look for help, and while these work-arounds sometimes caused more problems than they solved, I learned something else sorting them out.

And most important of all...I understood what I was learning.

**Quick note: My active duty career only lasted roughly 4 years, as I was more than ready to get out by the time I returned from Afghanistan in 2012. I eventually regretted rushing myself out of the service, and the leadership I had in the Guard in Washington had inspired a desire in me to do something more prestigious with the military. As a result, I spent several years focusing on trying to make the most of my Guard career, which led me to ignore or sideline this part of myself that was begging me to make games.

Picking a pathway

Errant Signal Games — Sun, 02 Aug 2020 17:48:19 +0000

Learning A Programming Language Is Going To Be Hard

I would know, I've tried it before. I had all the resources I needed, youtube, good advice, and a keyboard at my fingertips. I dabbled with HTML, C#, Javascript. I watched videos, (tried) reading books and articles (for some reason, after the start of nursing school, reading books of any kind began putting me straight to sleep).
But what I lacked was the intestinal fortitude to stick with it and push myself beyond that threshold of understanding; that point where my brain and experience connected the various different nodes that comprise the world of programming languages.

I owe it to myself to consider my circumstances, of course. I was raising two children (and still am), in the middle of a Bachelor degree program (that I was partially using game design to distract myself from), serving in the National Guard, and trying to be a good spouse. I did not serve any of these roles very well, as I had gotten in the habit of seeking distraction whenever the going got tough in one of these areas of my life. I am, as are we all, incredibly flawed, but this cycle of distraction and aversion was beginning to wearing on me.

I followed several tutorials, writing every line of code myself, but I was copying a tutorial, and at the end of the day I felt like I retained nothing. And I was right, I hadn't.
However, just this morning u/PMacDev, commenting on my own reddit post about designing a curriculum of study for myself, said this: "Don't get caught in tutorial hell, try to apply the tutorials to a project that you are working on."

Take Two, Three And Four

Now, I've already decided to take another crack at this game design thing, which means learning how to program. But tidbits of advice like this are what I love the internet for; u/PMacDev, who wrote a great blog post about a game building experience he had with Unity, brought me to a small, but crucial realization that fundamentally changes my approach to my current path of study in a positive way.

This brings me to the point of this post: Choosing a path. There are many paths to tread in this journey, and I will be typically be treading multiple paths at the same time. Because this journey can be so branching and complex, it's important to choose the right paths to travel and learn to recognize and make corrections as quickly as possible.
One of these branches is of course, choosing the right engine. In a video by Ask GameDev, they warn aspiring developers against trying to create their own game engines. I, for one, was shocked to hear this is a frequent mistake. I can barely grasp the concepts behind printing "Hello, world!" to the console, much less creating the framework for developing my own game on top of developing my own game.
As such, it's advice I have no shame reiterating, even as a total newcomer: Do not try to make your own game engine. lol

What Guides A Choice?

How to make such a decision is one of the hardest things to figure out, as it relies on commitment (my biggest issue to date). Unity relies on C#, Unreal Engine 4 relies on CPP, and too many of the reviews I come across boil down to "Well it depends..." and lists of general strengths and weaknesses. So instead I began researching the actual genre I was hoping to break into: Real-Time Strategy. Many articles over the last ten years have been lamenting the rise and fall of this beloved genre, but I firmly believe that new life can be breathed into it without relying on the complexities of 4X / grand strategy like Paradox Interactive's extensive list of games (as fantastic as they are) or inversely whittling down the genre to what amounts to little more than Real-Time Tactics where the player is as responsible for dictating which enemy to destroy as they are which bail of hay Peasant #23 should harvest next.

Determining what the strengths and weaknesses of the RTS genre are is as important as figuring out what I personally want to bring to the table in my own design when it comes to selecting an engine.
I have probably already bitten off more than I can chew of course. I'm selecting a genre that thrives on multiplayer capabilities, an outrageous feat for a newcomer like myself, yet I can hardly eschew the idea of implementing such a feature entirely. My alternative is crafting deep-thinking AI, an equally daunting task.
While Unreal Engine 4 may boast some very attractive features, for instance, it is also infamous for shoddy documentation regarding it's use of CPP. As a newcomer, is this a learning curve I want to risk climbing?
I must confess, these mountains have driven me to consider lesser factors, such as graphical qualities of the various engines, as well as what base level tools they support that may cut down on my workload.

What I know I need to do is stick to my core values, and yet I keep finding myself fantasizing about crafting a graphically beautiful RTS that is as fun to play as it is to look at. These things are likely not possible where I stand, so I am considering sidelining most visual elements in favor of text and simple maps and imagery to guide the player and give them a platform for making decisions.

And this brings me back around to an unfortunately less-than-helpful truth: A lot of it does "depend." Experimentation with multiple engines as I learn programming fundamentals is likely to yield better results for me to base a decision on down the road, as opposed to feeling like I have to make an absolute decision now, before I've even gotten started.

For me, I go back to u/PMacDev's comment: I'm going to take tutorial knowledge and apply it to my own little projects. Piece by piece I'll figure out which engine best suits my goals as I use these experiences to refine what those goals are to begin with. And that brings me back to the creation of my own study curriculum.

Thank you for reading.

What are your thoughts on the various strengths and weaknesses of available engines, insofar as their relation to the different genres we all know and love? I would love to hear people's thoughts, no matter how experienced or inexperienced you are in dev.

Cheers and beers,

Aaron

Learning what it means to pursue a passion

Errant Signal Games — Sat, 01 Aug 2020 16:58:41 +0000

I've spent most of my life "going with the flow"

By that, I don't mean "Casually taking what life offers," or any sort of enlightened take on how to navigate existence in a way that makes you happy and comfortable.

I mean more..."Carried by the strong current of a raging river." I've often felt as if there's little I can do about my circumstances or my life, or lacked the motivation to try and escape that "flow."

The Lore

I pursued the International Baccalaureate Program (think of a globe-trotting version of AP classes) in high school at my mother's urging. She thought it would help me succeed (I was always a C student who struggled with ADHD and motivation), and good mother's are forever concerned with your success.

I went to college after high school because that's what we've been telling teenagers they should do for the last 40 years.
I specifically attended the same college my dad did, even though I was accepted to Hartford University in Connecticut because, at the time, a part of me thought going to my dad's alma mater (the Evergreen State College) might strengthen what had always been a fairly painful relationship for me for many reasons.

Hartford is not the most prestigious school, yet a pretty good one. But as I'd always been a mediocre student, I didn't think I was good enough to take the plunge and pursue a "real" college career (resplendent with crippling debt and a degree in something lucrative).

After failing out of Evergreen (any who know the school will ask how that's possible, I'm sure), I was pushed by my girlfriend at the time to hold minimum wage jobs for the next few years until I made my next big decision: "I'll join the Army!"
The truth is, I wasn't happy in my relationship but had never broken up with anyone before and I wasn't doing anything with my life. I figured the Army would give me plenty to do. And they did.

I spent four years in the Army, got married and completed a tour in Afghanistan. When I got discharged, I pursued nursing because my wife was a nurse and she made decent money and liked it.
At the same time, I joined the National Guard because it provided access to really good health insurance and we were having our first child (who happened to be conceived on birth control*, fitting that "raging currents of life" theme). My wife also has Multiple Sclerosis (a crippling autoimmune disease that attacks the nervous system). A single vial of medication to treat relapses cost $30,000 in 2014 (just the vial, no treatment).

Halfway through nursing school is where I ran into trouble with this pattern of living for the first time.

In 2015, a friend of mine decided to leave his job at a large video game company and pursue making his own games. Previously my discussions about video games all had to do with playing them, but as we talked more, the discussion turned more towards how they're designed. Specifically, how are they designed to convey a particular experience. It was around this time the passion for design was awakened in me and I began to adopt a more active perspective toward my life.

I began asking questions like "Do I really want to continue serving in the Guard for the next 15 years just because it provides me health insurance?" Dealing with random deployments that disrupt life (and my nursing school career at one point) and suck the time and energy from you (moving straight from a school/work week into a Guard weekend and right back into a school/work week) was wearing me out.

We had our second child in 2016, the result of my own "Going with the flow" one evening while my wife was in between birth control sources*. While I had found things to enjoy about my burgeoning nursing career, my wife's desire to move from Washington to Georgia (her home state), was beginning to grow on me too. I needed a change of scenery, a new land to explore, and could not help but notice that this drive was coinciding with an increasing desire to do something in my life, rather than just react to what life was doing to me.

Where did this take me?

We finally agreed to sell our home in late 2019 and move to Georgia on the premise that I would seriously lay plans to pursue game design as my career. Discussing these things led me to uncover several other hidden desires.
I didn't just want to make video games, I wanted to publish them as well. I wanted to form a company that would find video games worthy of publication and help refine them and gift them to the world.
I began to understand what ambition felt like, and what it was like to chart your own course through the river of life, rather than your destination being a product of its currents.

Recently I sat down with the wife and presented to her my desires for a game development career. I would spent 2 years and 6 months trying to make a game while working part time as a nurse. I asked for 15 hours a week of uninterrupted time and now I am focused on building a pathway toward that plan. I am designing a curriculum of skills, compiling a running list of resources I will need and learning about mistakes to avoid.
I'm also learning that to pursue a passion means adopting new ways of interacting with people. I've been on social media most of my life, but always as a laughable pundit, an inconsiderate commentator, a troll, an emotional reactor, or an asshole, like anyone else.
I'm learning instead to be a responsible and respectful presence with the singular goal of generating an environment for people to explore the games I want to design and interact with the feedback they provide.
I'm learning to share more of myself instead of just the funny memes I run across on the Internet.
I'm learning to put my work out there, no matter how good or bad I think it is, and take criticism in stride. I'm learning to give credit where credit is due, and when not only to admit I've made a mistake, but how to craft and plan to repair the damage I've caused and commit to it.

My story thus far has been one of where life will carry me on its waters while I tread them.
But now it's becoming a story of where I can lead myself, just by picking a direction and choosing to swim.

This blog will serve as a record of that journey. I will update as frequently as I can with new posts. I will share concept art, sketches, any commissioned work I obtain, and publicly explore ideas for my game's design, its mechanics and story in order to build interest in my game and receive feedback on its content.

Thank you for reading.

*To be very, very clear: My children are awesome. I adore them both and don't regret their existence for a second. But their arrivals were great examples of how life can carry you if you don't use the river to carry yourself.