This post was published 8 months 6 days ago and as such, probably does not reflect my current opinion or ability.
There seems to be a commonly held belief that secretly all games programmers long to be artists.
I’ll admit that being able to draw anything even remotely resembling what I’m aiming for can be disappointing, but I certainly would never want to switch from being a programmer. That said, spending hours on a demo only for it to be ruined by horrible coder art is almost as frustrating as try to explain why it really *is* cool even if it doesn’t look like much. I guess that’s why I’ve fallen in love with the idea of procedural content generation.
Anyway, for me one of the best things about taking part in Dare to be Digital is getting to collaborate so closely with talented artists. Not just being given assets and getting them into the game as often ended up the case with my last project, but sitting as a whole team each day and discussing overall appearance and design. Each build looks far more impressive than the last as well as just having more features.
Obviously there are technical benefits as well. I’ve learned a whole lot about the processes 2D and 3D artists actually go through to develop content, what parts are most time consuming and what can be done far quicker than I’d imagined. And in terms of the art pipeline, it’s much easier to solve problems when you can talk through export and import options together.
The biggest thing for me though is really feeling like shaders and particle effects are there to compliment anything the artist produce. In personal and university projects, the aim often seems to end up being cramming in as many effects as possible to match a marker’s checklist, or to cover for the lack of assets. Here, it’s all about getting everything the artists produce looking as good as possible on the hardware we have, and ending up with a demo that looks coherent rather than just sparkly.