How I taught a kid about colour & shape theory with GameDev — Mentor Diaries: Months 1 & 2
Before we get into story-time proper, allow me to point you to the prologue of this story if you haven’t read it already.
This is part of a series of articles in which I document my experiences as I mentor a kid on life, and teach him the technical skills (and acumen), that he’ll probably rely on in his future career.
With that out of way, let’s get started!
The beginning of a new project
Back in late August/early September 2021, as we decided to begin work on a smaller game to save the finances of the old studio, we had to brainstorm a lot until we finally arrived at our favoured concept.
Working remotely all from different countries, we spent a lot of time in silence with our own thoughts at home. So, our initial approach to brainstorming was to allow each person to think up ideas on their own time.
However, this was taking quite a while, and none of us were coming up with any decent ideas (or even any ideas at all) that we saw as worthwhile enough to submit to the team.
Cid and I often had casual voice-chats by this point, so it made sense when he suggested we jump into one to try coming up with something.
The team-leader of the old studio had this idea that we could probably use this smaller project to promote our big main game, so a lot of our thought process was tainted with ideas related to said game. Yet since I believed such an angle was constricting our idea generation in a bad way, I pushed a lot for us to try something unrelated.
A lot of ideas in the initial stage were shot down by me, because they either weren’t fun, or were just utterly uninspired. (By that point, I was de-facto in charge of the smaller project due to our team-lead’s increasing job-related absence)
What we knew was that it had to be a casual game, so that the size of the game could be justified to the public.
We ran over all the technical requirements and limitations we had, so as to avoid coming up with ideas that were too ambitious for the short timeframe we had to make this game happen.
And eventually, nearing the end of our session, Cid hit the jackpot.
He saw a model boat he had laying around the room, and upon showing it to me, I suddenly knew we had something interesting that I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen anywhere else before.
The ocean, would be our prime subject.
You see… We pictured the oscillating and erratic movements of the ocean, and concluded that it wasn’t very common to find yourself playing a game that dealt with the subject of fluids as terrain. So, the mechanics of a body of water seemed quite interesting, and mostly an unexplored realm at that.
And the more we talked about it, the more convinced we got that we had found something that had a lot of potential.
Here’s the initial idea we came up with:
A 2D endless runner in which you control a ship to brave the waves in open sea, with disasters and calamities happening every so often around you to spice things up. (Calamities akin to big meteor showers, deadly storms, and even potentially a kraken attack of some kind)
And we were pumped!
Choosing the Right Tech
Okay. So, we had this interesting idea with some good old potential. Now, how do we act upon it?
Going over the restrictions we had for this project, several items came up as the most relevant:
- Since most of the old studio had gone dormant, we only had very limited manpower to create this game. Therefore, its design had to accommodate the requirement of being do-able by a team of 3–4 people at most. (The original studio was a team of 12 people, to get things into context)
- Since the art would mostly be done by a single person, it had to be really cheap to make, and require little animation to get implemented in-game.
(Combing through my memories, I’ve come to realise that I also didn’t really impose any design restrictions for audio/music due to my own lack of experience in those fields; along with the fact that code-wise, I simply assumed I wouldn’t have any trouble with programming for a project like this one. So the restrictions were mostly aimed at easing the load on Cid, since I knew how tough it was to do all the art by yourself).
So well… In light of such restrictions, the decisions we went with for each major pillar of game development were the following:
- I suggested we went with vector graphics “flat design” for our art-style, since that kind of style didn’t require as much effort to look good once you picked up on the basics.
(‘Flat design’ also has the added benefit of mostly distilling the fundamentals of colour theory into its simplest expressions. You don’t have to worry as much about shading as on other styles, and it also allows you to understand drawing as a composition of shapes, which in hindsight proved quite beneficial for Cid’s growth as an artist).
- We also decided to work with Unity, since that was the engine we had already been working on for the other project, and that experience would allow us to transfer much of our previous knowledge into this smaller project.
- Support from the other disciplines (audio and music) was very limited due to the fact that our Sound Designer was the very same Team-Leader that had been growing ever more absent as days went by, so I resolved to defer such decision-making on that matter to a later date.
And with all that out of way, I wrote down our initial design document for this game.
It was a bit shoddy, and not quite as exhaustive as I reckon is probably the standard for the AAA industry. But it already was an improvement over our old studio’s lack of a proper document for the big main game.
Regardless, we had what we needed, so we got to work.
From Baby Steps to Giant Strides
Cid had never drawn before in a vector model environment. He was more used to the raster model that’s more common in the 2D games industry. But that didn’t intimidate him in the least.
I knew that it would take me quite a while to get the water physics feeling right, so I was content with allowing him to experiment with as many designs as he wanted, so that he could pick up on the nuances of the model as soon as possible.
Even if the first few designs weren’t up to a competitive level, I was sure that with practice he would quickly reach a point where we could proudly display his art.
It took us the better part of September to get a working prototype in which the boat floated accurately, following the surface line of the water-body. But by the end of it, we were proud of what we had, and we could already tell that playing with the water physics was gonna be pretty fun.
The water reacted to collisions as intended, but without a function to manipulate the water and generate waves, our Viking longboat would just be floating on a sad pond.
That would be the task for the following weeks: Getting that water oscillating.
Adding some flair & style
By this point, we had the most core of basics, but our game still looked pretty barebones, to be honest.
My little buddy had spent quite a bunch of time teaching himself the skills needed for vector graphics. And once he realised that drawing with vectors was more akin to sculpting, than painting, he started making massive progress.
His shapes got more refined, the curves got smoother, and his overall understanding simply got so much better. Yet, his skills were still quite limited to drawing individual objects.
It was now time for us to delve into artistic composition.
As I worked on the generation of waves, I kept popping up on Discord to check on Cid and his progress.
He showed me the sail boat he made with much excitement (the one in the image above, the results of his effort and training for the past month). You could see him absolutely beaming with pride at his own progress. But I found the fact that he could no longer bear to watch his previous designs, back from when he first started, really amusing.
I honestly couldn’t refrain myself from dropping a hearty laughter at that fact, but I was rather pleased with his growth nonetheless.
I felt like a proud father watching his son excel in his craft. So you could tell at a glance that I was really happy.
We also worked together on getting the right look for our game, and he taught me what he had learned on colour harmonies when I suggested making our sky a striking yellow, to contrast with the blue of the ocean.
He tinkered with the colours for quite a bit until we finally found the right mix and mood.
I also made a couple sketches to show him what I had in mind for the view the player would see when the game started, and he dutifully made them into reality, one by one.
A couple mountains, and dock to get us started. Some background waves to give the scene depth…
And the crowning set-piece that would bring everything together: a striking lighthouse that would serve as the focal point of the composition.
Top it off with some good old lighting, and finally, we had achieved something that actually resembled a game.
Progress was really going smoothly on the game, on account of both of our efforts.
But just as we were getting more and more ingrained with each other, things on the studio were starting to approach a serious boiling point where I could no longer hope to avert my eyes from the disaster.
By that point, only Cid and I were actually working on any of the two projects. The Discord server had gone silent, and I had no formal authority to change any of the things that were hurting us so much.
I had to make a decision.
If I truly hoped that our project would ever see the light of day, I had no other choice:
I had to leave…
Thank you for accompanying us on this journey into game development, education, and personal growth, as we flail our arms all over the place trying to find our right way to do things.
I hope that our journey is useful to you, or at the very least, entertaining to read.
If you want to see how this story ends, make sure to follow me here on Medium. Or if you also want to tune into what I’m learning on a daily basis, you can follow me on Twitter (I’ll make sure to let you know when the next part of this series comes live).
That’s all for today.
Bye bye!
