One of the things I enjoyed the most about making animated films was the problem solving aspect- Visual fx/Special fx require the most problem solving and I really enjoyed coming up with solutions to technical/creative problems.
BUT most of the work making animated films does NOT involve that kind of problem solving- the problems to solve come down to the storytelling-pacing-plot- and with those "problems" there is no "right" answer as its entirely subjective- so you can wrestle with them for weeks/months/years and come up with an answer you believe to be "right" but someone else could see it as totally wrong as again its totally subjective-
After being presented with these problems for so long and answering them to the best of your ability only to realize that no answer is "right" it sort of loses the fun-
As do most geeks I LOVE problem solving and I got sorta bored with animated filmmaking problem solving....
Three weeks into it- I'm officially in love with game development as I work on my first official game tentatively titled "Douchebots" as there is non-stop problem solving and in there problems there are right answers as things either work or they don't- if a script/state machine/behavior tree is setup incorrectly you'll get an error and it won't work- and if there are no errors yet it still doesn't do what you want then you have to figure out what the issue is-
Since I'm new to Unity and the visual scripting tool I'm using, Playmaker- as I work I have Unity Answers and the Playmaker forum open on my browser as I problem solve-
In just a few weeks I've been able to create basic AI for both land and air npc's- in which they chase the character- fire at them when in range- taunt them when they go out of range- react when hit and when they hit the player- Yesterday I created a sentry turret type thing that scans a corridor and when the player enters it sounds an alarm and fires an electronic net at the player that freezes the player for a fixed time- and a bunch of other stuff I'm really excited about-
My wife had previously joked that I loved Bitcoin more than her and now she claims I love game development more as I'm totally obsessed haha
The big challenge in my last film I am Nightmare didn't involve any technical ones- it just came down to work rate as I kept it pretty simple on the technical side- I challenged myself to create a 2 hour fully animated cg feature film in a year or less and I did it- it made my wrist hurt a lot and fucked up my neck and back doing it but I was excited to achieve my goal- I enjoyed and was excited to create the emotions I did in that film BUT it wasn't as exciting as game dev is-
I'm already an "expert" in cg animated filmmaking so a lot of habits are ingrained- I have a process- a way of doing things that I've developed over the years- its reliable BUT its not exciting
I can see game development being exciting and challenging FOREVER
I'm just exploding with ideas for games too 0_0 I have outlines for 10-20 different projects and here are my notes/sketches for what I'm doing now- here's some of my crappy sketches for this game
So yeh- game development is AWESOME and I'm looking forward to sharing me games with you ^ ^
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