So, big changes.
Around Fall 2024 I made an important decision in my life: I was going to stop pursuing the games industry in any serious way, Indie to AAA. I made one last little hurrah in unity to slake a conscious thirst to build a kind of "Tecmo's Deception, but with Ragdolls" kind of deal, and it was a lot of fun to piece together and then I just kinda.. let it die once my curiosity has been satisfied with it. And then I hung up the hat like I said I was going too.
The games industry in all it's shapes and forms, I realized way too late, that it's not the industry I wanted to join as a bright eyed youngster growing up in the 90's. I wanted, still in 2020, to build games like it WAS the 90's/00's. And it only occured to me in 2024 that.. that's not really possible anymore, at least not in a way that could sustain. I appreciate creators like David (of Dusk fame) for keeping the idea of retro-in-a-modern-wrapper alive, but at the end of the day.. those are still built using today's todays tools, and trying to make something appear retro, instead of being built from the ground up AS "retro" like what I was doing.
It was a huge relief off my shoulders when I closed Visual Studio for the last time. I had my run building small little graphics engines with opengl and directx. I had my run using modern engines to build game jams in. I had my run trying to build engines from scratch, having written a fun little raycaster engine akin to Wolf3D. That was all fun. But it was time to refocus my energy.
In summer 2023 I took up woodworking, bought a buch of power tools and had a ton of fun building a shed, dog house, a lap desk, my workbench, etc. Was a good time. Unfortunately 2024 had other plans, with two records being set for both Hottest heat during summer months, and wettest year with continuoual rainfall basically the entire year. My "workshop" is outside, and you can't use those tools outside in the rain, unfortunately. I just didn't have the facilities needed to be able to explore my new creative outlet for the entirety of the year.
So when in December 2024 I gave up my game development hobby, and couldn't be outside exploring my woodworking hobby.. I .. kinda.. just.. became complacent. Watched a ton of TV and Movies. Got lazy and fat. And worse of all, anytime I wanted to be creative on a computer... I had nothing. My muse was completely gone.
I remembered how much I liked making radio plays and podcasts and "bumpers", and for a time I tried to focus on making some, even built a new channel around the idea, but absolutely nothing was coming to me at all. I even got depressed (which didnt help my newfound slovenly sedendary lifestyle) because I realized my muse was gone, and any trickle of new ideas I had, were still game dev ideas and experiements. Briefly toyed with the idea of comig out of game dev retirement but keeping everything just to myself. I dismissed that notion.
And then.. something happened. I was on my computer, struggling to think of anything creative to do. Meanwhile my wife and oldest daughter were in an adjacent room making earrings together to sell at a craft fair. They were listening to christmas music (this was early December) and having a good time. My wife comes toward me and grabs my attention to show off their latest creations, which looked great. But then she revealed to me that while listening to "Ho Ho Ho" by Sia, my oldest daughter (11) could envision during the instrumental hook this visual of nutcrackers in multiple single file lines with their different instruments, to the beat of the song.
This moment was like a brick being thrown at my head. I could "see" exactly what she was seeing too (I can't really picture things in my head like that, but I knew what she was getting at) and it struck me that I simply NEEDED to create that for her. But.. with what?
Long story short, I've decided to go back to my actual roots. That's right baby, I reinstalled Maya and I'm going all in on 3D Shorts. But it's been like.. 15+ years. Why Maya? Because I dislike Blender, by quite a bit in fact. I've always preferred working with Maya, and it's a powerful animation focused software that I want to "git gud" with again. There is no desire to join the animation industry, there is no deep needed want to change my profession. I just want to make some 3D cartoons.
Let me tell ya, what an absolutely liberating train of thought. I can't believe it took me so long to come back to this. Ever since I boarded this train, my mind's been racing again, eager, excited, and hungry. Something I was already familiar with, a community I was already a part of (just long estranged), and as a fun little bonus: something fun I can show my kids as I'm making it (They're not so easily impressed with Lines of Code 😂). And, I get to come back to Newgrounds and revive my college YouTube channel. I've also done a bit of re-branding. It'll take a minute to make my newgrounds account reflect it (because it costs money to do), but my animation channels will be under the "Kyle On Demand" (or KOD) banner.
So how's it all going so far?
Well, first thing was first, I grabbed a nutcracker model from Sketchfab, gave it a skeleton, spent some time making a rig the only way I knew how (I'm from the old schooll 'DigitalTutors' era, don't mind me) and got to work making that thing march in a line while blowing a trumpet. My family, but especially my oldest, were _enthralled_ with this. But.. while it felt amazing making something like that again (What a thrilling experience it was to see the final render) I knew.. deeeeep down, that I couldn't continue making animations the way I was trained to do nearly 20 years ago. 3D animation and the techniques involved have changed quite a bit, and while Maya itself feels like an old glove I slipped on that still fits, a lot of the tools inside the program have changed dramatically. Heck the renderer was even different (No longer MentalRay, it was now this PBR based one called Arnold... which I had no experience dealing with). I did try to see if I could continue to use the rig I had made for another instrument, but the piece of trash rig I had built was not able to handle it well, and what was worse was that Maya started getting confused over what I was trying to do exactly and kept wigging out on me (not crashing). Now that i've proven to myself what I want to do... it was time to unlearn everything I thought I knew about it, and come at this fresh.
I deleted the old rig and opened up YouTube. It was time to get settled in with a new workflow, new techniques, new.. everything. Basically. Something else occured to me as I was going through all this.. my TARGET has also changed. I'm no longer building indiviudlal animations for use in game engines. For a moment.. I considered the idea of Machinima with something like Source or Unreal. But... that's become so ...normal to do these days, even Epic Rap Battles of History is doing that shit now. No, I've decided to plant my feet on creating rendered offline scenes (as in, not real time like in a game engine and captured after the fact). But this meant.. really getting familiar with building scenes, and not just individual assets to be assembled later in something else. And not only that, but catering to a specific renderer like Arnold. To make matters more intense on myself, as I always do, I also decided that I didn't want to, for the large part, use other peoples models either. So, it was time to pick up modeling again, something I hadn't really done in about as long.
But what style? 3D has come a very long way from the days of Reboot and Jimmy Neutron. I searched for quite a while over what "style" I wanted to try directing my efforts towards. Concluded pretty quickly that I did not have a passion or even passing interest from Sculpting. So, low poly it is. But what to do with that low poly? And that's when it struck me... Hoolopee. Hoolopee has been setting the standard for "Low Poly PS1 Aesthetic" for several years now, famously creating and animating Gwimbly from Smiling Friends recently. I adored this look and feel. Low poly, flat shaded, low rez textures, and simple though stylized designs.
So where's this leave the nutcracker animation? I told my kid about what it was that I was learning, and she admitted she forgot all about it anyways, so she's forgiven me for not delivering on that project. She was stoked on the trumpet animation short I did make though, and was happy enouggh with that. Cool. I was able to retire that project.
Currently I'm working on my character modeling techniques and figuring out my process there. And meanwhile, if I'm going to be doing original characters, I need to be able to draw again for the character sheets. So that's what I've been focusing on in the meanwhile.
I really am going from scratch. And it's been very exciting and creativly fulfilling so far.
In fact, just two days ago, I got a bit of inspiration. The first inspiration for an animation project in an extremely long time. See, back after I left college, my brother made a quip to his friends (or me, I can't quite remember) that was kind of like this clint eastwood kind of voice about not following the rules. It made me laugh so much i turned it into a script, then into a radio play, and then I even started working on the animation, called "The Rules". After a bit I abandoned it in favour of my new programming profession. Truth is, I was never truly happy with the script, it was kinda funny, but it just didn't make much in the way of sense.
I decided to make "The Rules" v2. Banged out a script over a lunch hour, and sent it to my brother, who's decided he wants to voice one of the two characters. In fact the one who says the eponymous line. Perfect.
It's all coming together. And I can't wait to start sharing it's progress here.
Thanks for reading.
