I was stuck on scening the chaos/warped space section. Every other section had clear rules, e.g. I could only use certain elements, whereas this section is supposed to have no rules. So I had to employ a different mindset to move forward: “Don’t think too much about it”. I didn’t think too much and doodled away and a beautiful mess came out.
Automation vs Manual Work
Programmers like me frequently have this dilemma: Should I manually do this tedious thing, or create automation to do it for me? In my case, I’m building tools that could be useful for everyone, so I do have incentive to automate as much as I can. But I had a quickly approaching deadline. I determined that it would be faster to manually draw ribbons than to figure out how to extend the curve tool to create them for me.
Then, after I finished drawing the ribbons, I found out it took less time than expected to extend the curve tool to make ribbons. I’m not sure what lesson I learned here. Maybe I tend to err on the side of pessimism as a reaction from being too optimistic in the past? Predicting the required amount of work is a generally hard problem in software engineering.
Getting Attached vs Redoing it
There are times we get too attached to what we made and are unwilling to iterate upon it. There are times we keep redoing something without making progress. There are times we accidentally lose progress, but after redoing it, we realize we did it better the second time around. If you accidentally lose progress, reassure yourself you’ll do it better the second time.
Working Outside Your Comfort Zone
When you work outside your comfort zone, you become a lot more aware of your creative process. I’m not an illustrator or story teller, but I forced myself to work in those mediums and became hyperaware of the nature of those mediums and my own processes. This is how I’m bringing you all these lessons I’ve learned. This experience will help me with my future ambitions.
Critical Feedback
When we get engrossed in a project, it’s very easy to zoom in on details and lose sight of the bigger picture and we tend to get desensitized to other details. If you’re looking to achieve a specific effect with your project, or just want to understand how others perceive it in general, the best thing you can do is to ask for critical feedback from other people who work in the same or similar medium. Their perspective is uncolored by how much you’ve already stared at your project, and their different experiences, backgrounds, and tastes can bring you really valuable insight that you may not have been able to see otherwise.
I already planned out most of Omniverse II, but right when I was finishing up the project, I knew I should verify if what I planned actually had the effect I wanted. So I solicited feedback from Rabid Squirrel, and they gave me really helpful suggestions like tweaking the camera work and adding the “danger spikes”.
Lessons for Line Rider Artists
Note: As I wrote this out, I realized these may be more suitable as standalone pieces with potential for way more depth. Consider these rough drafts.
Storytelling
The biggest lesson is how to tell a story. From that follows world building, lore, set creation (spatial structure), pacing, and generally being critical of everything with respect to fitting into the narrative. You may have a lot of cool ideas, but if you want to tell a coherent story, you need to make it cohesive and you’ll probably have to throw away the irrelevant parts, even if they are cool.
Unique to Line Rider is structural cohesion, how the track is spatially arranged. Consider the structure of the world you build and how Bosh’s traversal drives the narrative. Is Bosh entering a new area? Is he returning to a previous area? Did he fall and need to get back up?
Olympic Puppetry as Narrative
I wanted to demonstrate how we can use movement techniques as a means towards something greater rather than for its own sake. And the clearest way to do that is to reclaim such a feat of olympic puppetry as a compelling story, retrofitting a narrative in its place where the movement seems to emerge from how Bosh interacts with the environment he is in.
Recycling/Revisiting as Narrative
Recycling was another one of those movement techniques done for the sake of overcoming the challenge. But it can be used for narrative purposes, like being stuck in a loop or traveling through a past part of the track in the opposite direction to “turn back”. I think there’s more narrative depth that could be done with revisiting, much more than in Omniverse II, perhaps in a track featuring a more intricate story.
Embrace the Void: Negative Space
In a composition, negative space is the absence of content, contrasting with the content that’s there. While negative space is already commonly used in Line Rider tracks, I think it’s still worth discussing. Negative space in Line Rider can be in the form of the white void (absence of lines) or as airtime (absence of movement). There are obvious uses like dramatic moments in the music, but we should also consider more subtle “less is more” cases, like bringing attention to an object by removing details around the object.
Embrace the Void: Fade Out
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3nY44Ao
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