In this blog post I will show you some of the ridiculous things I have done, tried and experienced when learning game development. This has been a trip down memory lane for me as I have kept these images over two decades soon. So without further ado, let us backtrack into my memory lane. I hope you enjoy it.
This is when I probably starting getting a bit more serious in learning tools and getting into something creative. It was also around the same time I started studying for game design. That is not to say I did not do anything before but it started taking off around this time. So, one of the first 3D I did was by copying someone else and it was something along this.
Around the same time I obviously started getting into Photoshop due to texturing. However, I was curious about manipulating images into other images. For some reason I wanted Will Smith into other movies. And iRobot. And Matrix.
During this time I was active in forums and community in one way or another. So I obviously had to create signatures. At the time I was focusing mostly on Level Design.
I started getting into Neverwinter Nights 2 community and took parts in designing big worlds for the next couple of years in community servers like Frontier and later Khalidine under other usernames. We would research the main game and then design our own town, forest, dungeons and more. It was one of the coolest time of my life. Enjoy some of my earlier modding works of NWN2 Community work below. Some part of a team effort obviously.
You can see that some of my later work started having better level design, story telling and lighting.
It was not long until I started entering other genre and exploring other engines. I expanded to Unreal Engine fairly early in the days, offering level design for others and becoming part of the communities. First I had to learn the engine and this is literally how the first map looked like where I just dragged everything in.
Around this time I had started year 2 in game design studies. And together with my classmates we had put together a custom level from scratch, our own game mode and I had created a custom weapon on the side for another project while also doing linear level design for another artist. I was first doing linear level design so let us look at that first.
Meanwhile I was improving with my team mates by troubleshooting issues, scripting and learning to be a project leader too.
Eventually we finished our level while I was juggling external projects and learning extra things on my own, below is the team effort of Nahnoc our level and game mode.
I realized 3D modelling is not for me so I stopped over a decade ago. 10 years later I did resume to teach 3D modelling and learning Maya. But that is another topic for another time. I never did relearn my modelling skills though after leaving it for over a decade or two. Technically this was my last 3D model a few years back when learning Maya. So, I guess you never stop to revisit on some occasions. The reason is because even if you are not trying to be the best in something, it does not mean you should not stay up to date in it.
After doing some 3D and Engine work I tried experimenting a bit with drawing briefly as I was also figuring out 2D texturing a bit.
Around this time I realized I like shading and at the time I did not think much about it. Only to realize later it is kind of related to lighting when it comes to my artistic skills and preference at this stage.
So the point here is that I have tried quite a lot, practiced different things and gained a lot of experience during my student years. You can tell that I was not particularly good or talented but I put in the hours, time, networking and hard work. So, if you feel things are doing slow. People are not supporting you. Other people are better. Whatever the reason. I hope I am a living example of making professional living out of games in one way or another for about 14 years.
