of whatever you'd call the position I'm in when trying to build holozing.
Thought I'd give people a little bit of insight towards some of my day to day. It's something I've mentioned many times before but I'm obviously not the best person in charge of running this project. Even though I've been trying pretty hard there's been many times where things have caught up to me later when I've realized that I could've done them better or times where due to approaching it in the wrong way/being inexperienced it has caused for more work down the line.
It's not news I don't think, when we first announced holozing I'm sure people understood that I'm merely a gamer with a dream and vision. I know games and I like games and I've usually had quite a good idea of what's going to trend in the next few years not just gaming related alone. I've often been early to what you'd consider things were to catch in popularity later, i.e. the things I've enjoyed and liked that I happened to find early turned out to be something that'd been missing and the masses following in the same footsteps later on. Naturally there's also been a lot of things I've missed, tiktok for instance, never got into that and not really regretting it either. Hive one could say I (we) are still quite early and it hasn't caught up yet but I'm sure its time will come seeing how web2 social is doing these days.
With Holozing there's been a few instances where I've realized I could've been prepared for it better had I been more experienced or just had more insight on certain things. Recently as we've been laying down a lot of work on 3d assets this became a bit more obvious. For instance, a 2d illustration of a creature is somewhat easy to be created by the artist, but to then continue giving it the same look/vibe in 3d is a completely different level, and yeah I realize the pun there in dimensions being another level, etc. While the 2d artist has been good at drawing sketches of what the creature would look like from the front, side and back, merging that into 3d is still not something that can work flawlessly since the creature wasn't fully 3d to begin with. I probably need to include an example to better point out what I mean here. Let's look at Waller for instance:
Having asked the artist to draw sketches of it from the front and side, we received this:
At first glance you think all well and good, right?
But when you look closer at things and try to imagine it in 3d, you come to realize that for instance if the 1st line on the left here remains the way it is, then it kind of is impossible for the eyes to be as center in front of the face of waller in the other picture.
That line would have to push the eyes way more to the front, giving it a different look from the sides to make the other image work - this is something that becomes apparent when looking at the 3d model. It could be that the original illustrator hadn't thought it through properly and just drew the angled sketches to what he thought looks the best without considering that it's not 3d viable.
It is however something that came to me as a surprise as well because I haven't had much experience with turning things into 3d, so a lot of today has been spent into figuring out how to make it work anyway without having the 3d model look too different from the 2d rendition. It is however something that's given us more insight as to how to do things in the future and for the illustrator to keep this in mind when generating new creatures that the intentions are to turn them into 3d from the beginning.
Anyway, while this adds some extra costs to things and additional time. I wanted to take the time here today to mention that even with certain mistakes along the way we still have a lot of room for this before things "take a turn for the worse". We've been through quite rough situations this year with funding getting as small as $500/week at one point to it in a couple months allowing us to catch up on all debt and having extra funds for the near future.
It also helps that we've launched the project quite fairly with anyone and everyone on here being able to participate, whether they're just interested in the short term hive gains/speculation or to see the project through long term - this gives us quite an advantage and we've attempted to do as much as we can for the funding we received. While some things can be considered amateurish based on most people working on the project coming from short "contracts" to "commission-based work" to "trust we'll pay them eventually" we've still been very happy with the work these people have been doing for the project and how things are falling into place now. This was a lot harder early on when having to filter, trial and error and look through many, many artists until we found some we really liked their work and thought fit well with the project's vision and quality threshold.
Anyway, just thought I'd make a quick post based on something I ran into today so you can get an idea of the things we're doing on a day to day basis.
We're looking forward to the holiday's as that means certain devs in our team who have "real life" jobs will be able to push through some things that haven't made as much progress as we would've wanted by now, while at the same time some other devs who've been working more on holozing will be able to take some time off and enjoy some vacation and traveling.
Personally I may take a short trip for new years but haven't decided yet, got a lot of stuff to balance out in the game before we invite a few alpha testers in that I've kind of had to postpone these last few days due to other stuff like this getting in the way and needing my attention. :P
