I’m a regular listener of Coffee with Butterscotch podcast, hosted by the fantastic 3-brother developers of Butterscotch Shenanigans, who created some of my favourite mobile games such as Quadropus Rampage and Crashlands. They faithfully follow their Thursday release schedule, going as far as pre-recording the episodes if they knew they won’t be working in the coming weeks, such as Christmas period.
In one of their episodes, they expressed that after having been doing this podcast for 5 years, it feels like a weekly recap to them. They’ve come to see the recording as the hour out of their work schedule, where they sit down and reflect together how their week has been.
I don’t see myself nearly as entertaining as they are in voice. I’m more comfortable with writing instead. This blog will have to do, to serve as my version of weekly reflection.
Since beginning my new job last week, I didn’t complete as many katas as I wanted, but I have many other topics to fill the space, starting with something I began two weeks ago but didn’t have time to write about.
Bring Forth the Brain Movies
Ever heard of the term “brain movies”? I’m the kind of visual thinker who has movies playing in my head all the time. When I listen to music, or read a story, I have motion pictures going through my head, with panning landscapes and characters doing their own things. I’ve participated in roleplaying communities as an outlet to make use of these brain movies. In fact, 3D animation was my original motivation to study programming, because programming was a prerequisite for 3D graphics in my university. This music video in particular pushed me into taking the leap.
After almost failing my first year programming, and painstakingly crawled my way through C++ and Java, I finally made it to my first 3D animation class. That was it. That was the moment I worked so hard for. I could finally turn my brain movies into real movies, and show the world what kind of amazing worlds I’ve been seeing in my head.
I gave up after I passed the subject.
The first thing we learned was animating the walk cycle. It was the equivalent of drawing art, where you must master the technique of drawing perfectly shaped cubes and spheres before you can comfortably draw anything else. The walk cycle is just like that in animation — it is the absolute basic thing you must master in order to truly understand the foundation of animation.
Perhaps this is why I never did art, despite my heavy preference for visual information. I did not find joy in tweaking such small little detail, as fine as every millisecond of a walk cycle. It felt tedious, I felt impatient, and I kept wanting to spend my time doing other things instead, like fiddling with WordPress themes.
Since I gave up pursuing 3D animation, any game ideas I have were strictly reserved for 2D environment. I was happy when my current online course specifically requested 2D for all assignment submissions.
Then I discovered the trend of low-poly 3D. Something inside me still itched for the freedom of 3D perspective in games, and low-poly felt a lot more doable. I never fancy making photo-realistic 3D games like AAA titles anyway. When Humble Bundle released a large package of low-poly game props for 15 quid, I went for it.
But I still have to animate the characters some how. While the characters in the bundle are rigged, the bundle does not contain animation.
Enter Mixamo by Adobe — a completely free, no-string-attached library of common humanoid animations, including walking, sitting, attacking, all sorts of motions that are common in games. You can download whatever animations you want with a bonus free character model of your choice, or upload your character and the website will map the skeleton for you! If you have a rigged character like mine from Humble Bundle, Mixamo just recognises the rig and apply animations automatically, without you having to specify character joints. This video teaches you how to take the animation from Mixamo to Unity:
The existence of Mixamo has solved a large chunk of my obstacle in bringing brain movies to life, but of course it doesn’t mean animators are out of business. Every project has special motions that Mixamo is not going to have (most definitely the case for my brain movies). If your game has nothing but the common animations from Mixamo, it’ll probably get boring fast. However, having the essentials taken care of, certainly brought back hope to my dream of making my brain movies real again.
GatsbyJS — Getting Ahead of Myself
ReactJS is one of my front end development learning goals. I followed an advice regarding portfolio building — start a development blog, and I decided to do it with a ReactJS site generator hosted on GitHub. What better way to show my skills than to eat my own dog food?
That’s when I stumbled into GatsbyJS, a ReactJS library but to me, at this point, it feels more like a CMS made with ReactJS. Not the kind of CMS like WordPress with full graphical admin interface, of course, but the kind of code-based CMS where there are plenty of site templates and code snippets ready to go for a blog, a magazine site, a portfolio site and anything else.
I’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of ReactJS, so jumping into a library like GatsbyJS felt a little like I’m learning to run before I can walk. This is my first time working on a website using JAMstack as opposed to the traditional PHP+MySQL server architecture like WordPress, but I’m enjoying the experience of deploying a website with Gatsby + Netlify + GitHub.
Since I’m already writing this blog, I’ve put my personal development blog on the backburner. Instead I’m using GatsbyJS to create a website showcasing my gameplay in No Man’s Sky, where I’m attempting a galactic marathon of jumping through all 255 galaxies in the game. At the moment I share my in game moments to my community in Discord, but I want my journey documented on a website for better display and archiving. Hopefully I will have more progress and experience to share next week.
Burnout Index
Speaking of burning, burnout is real.
If you see yourself in any of the following:
- Not feeling like doing the things that you normally enjoy;
- Can’t stop thinking about your responsibilities and your to-do list;
- The future looks bleak, hopeless and empty;
- Gets frustrated and irritated easily;
- Not even feeling anything at all;
You are not a bad person. You are not a failure. You are suffering burnout.
The first thing you should do is just stop. It’s hard to believe and hard to do, but just stop for a second. You won’t be stopping forever. Your work will not fail from just stopping for a second to breathe and reflect. Take care of yourself first.
Zach shared https://burnoutindex.org/ for checking your burnout level. This website also makes recommendations on what you can do about it. Even if you think you are not feeling that bad, fill out the form anyway to check in with yourself.
Every week, I thought I would have less things to say in the next Wombo Combo. Then I ended up with another 1300+ words and wondered how I did it. On top of thanking you to have read this far, I want to give a big shout out to my oneleif family for having my back throughout my journey of learning and creating.
Come check out oneleif today and say hi!
