In many cases, when something that was supposed to only take one day takes two. All your hard work can become useless in a matter of seconds, especially when the screen flashes blue and all the files you worked on all week are nowhere to be seen and it’s just not working right. Indeed, ’tis the time for fixing things.
Over the past week, development on “Metamorphosa” (the name of the nightclub I am working on, by the way) is moving forward, but at a much slower pace than before. The reason for it is very simple. Now that I have finished putting the major building blocks together, it’s time to make the space look as close to the concept art as possible. That means tweaking and fixing little things as well as adding new, less boxy shapes. It also means that whenever I look at my work from when I started, I find that I can make it better and faster now. So, in the end, I spent a lot of time re-doing my own work.
During that time, I realized this is a very common. Around the studio, everyone seems to be fixing things. I suppose it’s those “problem solving abilities” you hear so much about in college. Building and creating is fun and rewarding, but being able to look at your work, determine what’s wrong with it and then being able to fix it, is certainly a big part of making art for video games.
What does that mean for me, the prospective game artist?
It means making things that look great is definitely a good thing, but being able to look back with a critical eye and improve it is even better.
