Making game environments is hard and takes time!
How I persevered to finish a big environment
Yesterday as I was working on the Spanish Town tutorial, I noticed how long it took to actually finalize the environment. I made a quick twit about that and was overwhelmed with the response. Lots of people wrote back about how it was great for them to hear that, so I thought I’d expand on this subject and hopefully offer you a bit of relief if you ever find yourself in a situation where you feel overwhelmed and want to quit your project because it became too much work. In this post, I will discuss some strategies to avoid this before you start your project and some suggestions of what you can do if that happens during production.
So sit tight and let’s review what happened when I started the Spanish Town project, and what happened during!
How The Spanish Town project started
It all started when I decided to make another tutorial to share what I had learned since the “Make an Office Tutorial” that I made years ago. When I made that tutorial, my intention was to just start from zero, without a clear idea, and show how you can come up with something as you go. It was more about recording every single step of the way, so people can see every click I did during the production of that environment. Not a very structured process, but one that can give good results too.
For the new tutorial, I wanted to take a different approach, and have a much more structured approach. Something that can be replicated and adapted to every new environment I make, some sort of “formula” you may say.
So with that intention in mind, I started researching and working on the idea in my mind.
Before Making Any Art
A good beginning will set you up for success!
The beginning of a project is the most crucial aspect. Start well, and your chances of success will be high. Start randomly, and your chances of success will be more random.
In the past, I used to just start projects without a clear goal. I’d get excited about some textures I wanted to make, or about some artwork that I saw that inspired me and would start just making the art assets.
That worked well in the beginning, it was fun to see quick results. But every single time I’d hit a roadblock and wouldn’t know how to proceed. Every. single. time.
They say the definition of insanity is to make the same mistakes over and over again. Well, you can say that I was insane for a long time when it came to environment art 😂
Anyway, working on Overwatch maps with a tight deadline (and around so many talented peers!) allowed me to hone my skills and process with each map. For that opportunity, I’m forever grateful!
I started taking a more structured approach and developed my own process to make all kinds of environments (and one that I’m sharing with you on this tutorial so you can develop your own too!).
Know your objective before making any art!
This brings me to the first point: Before making any art, get to know your idea very well. Have your main objective in mind at all times, because that will help you scope and choose the right theme.
Some questions to ask yourself:
What is my intention with this environment? Do I want to learn one specific skill set (say, get better at Substance Designer?) Or do I want to try something I never did before (making a stylized environment when you only made photoreal environments before)? Knowing the answer to this question will allow you to pick the right theme/scope.
How long do I want to dedicate to this? 1 month? 3 months? 1 year? As long as it takes?
Have I made environments before? (If you only made small scenes, maybe it’s not a great idea to jump onto a huge environment all by yourself. However, if you are a seasoned vet, you can push your skills and make something that you never made before).
Am I passionate enough about this idea to keep motivated as long as I can?
Can I realistically achieve this with my current skill level? (If you are just getting starting don’t pick a Rococo environment to make!)
How much can I dedicate to this? (If you have kids, a full-time job, and other duties you probably have little time available. Meanwhile, if you are a full-time student you can dedicate much more)
And on and on.
With the answers to those questions, you will eliminate a lot of ideas that you just wouldn’t be able to do realistically.
Get familiar with the theme/style you are shooting for
Once you have answers to those questions, and you know the scope of your project, start researching and get very familiar with the theme/style you are shooting for.
Take some good time analyzing pictures/videos/games (wherever you are drawing inspiration from) and look for details/elements that are not so obvious at first.
If you are inspiring your work on an existing place, what are the elements that stand out for you that make that place unique?
Knowing that will allow you to hone in on what will make your environment unique, and weed out the ideas that won’t fit. If you are working on an abandoned industrial warehouse, it won’t do you any good to have pictures of a spaceship! (Of course, this is a stupid example but you get what I mean 🙂).
Starting To Make Art
Start with the basics and iterate
Before making any textures, why not spend 2 minutes making a quick napkin sketch of the space?
Then take the time to blockout the entire space. The blockout will be foundation upon which you will build the environment.
I was only able to persevere to the end with the Spanish Town because my blockout was solid and solved many problems. It took 2 months to do this foundational work, and about a year just making that foundational work look pretty :)
By splitting the production into phases, you drastically increase your chances to persevere to the end.
Here are some screenshots of the project at different stages. Notice how from day one it’s pretty much the same environment, but the vision gets sharper and sharper with time.
Keep your project clean!
This is essential. Keep a consistent naming convention/folder structure so you don’t waste any time looking for things, or questioning where to save them.
It’s very common for artists to overlook this. I mentored quite a few people, and almost all of them had a lot of trouble finding assets in the asset browser. Sometimes there were several duplicates of the same texture in the same project!
Avoid that at all costs.
During production always take a few minutes to clean things up when they get too messy. You will thank yourself in the end. Avoid having duplicates of assets, and especially, avoid saving your assets anywhere you please.
In the Spanish Town tutorial, I will share my personal folder structure/naming convention. But you can easily find tried-and-true solutions online.
During Production
Getting in the zone
If you don’t know how to yet, you have to learn how to get “in the zone”.
This means getting in a mind state where there are no distractions and you are one with the environment.
If you are a beginner it will be very hard to get into this state because you are still learning the software and the process, so don’t stress too much. Just put in the effort and you will get there!
If you are a seasoned vet, you have to develop personal rituals and habits that allow you to get in the zone. For me, it’s getting a bunch of the stuff out of the way first (emails, coffee, reading a book, getting a bit of sun, maybe going for a walk, etc…). Then I just sit down and work for 1-3 hours, then take a long break. Rinse and repeat.
I’m not sure if this work with everyone, but it helps me to put specific music to create specific moods. Usually, when I’m working on one environment, I listen to the same band/album non-stop. Maybe because the music is familiar, it becomes just background? If I’m listening to random songs, it’s just too distracting. (And I envy the people who can work with podcasts/videos on). Chuck Palahniuk wrote an excellent article about this.
Recharging
Take the time to do things you enjoy. Read your books, watch your animes, and play your games. You don’t have to work constantly. Allow yourself to have some pleasures. That’s how you can keep your mind clean and at its peak for long periods of time.
Avoid overindulging though. The way our brain works (in regards to Dopamine), is to seek things that give us pleasure and avoid things that cause us pain. But if we always just seek pleasurable things, it becomes a habit, and you will be incapacitated. I know because I have these moments of overindulgence, and when I notice that’s happening, I take a quick detox (just break whatever habit for some time until you get back to baseline. With some habits you will just have to find a way to quit).
The message here is: Give yourself time to enjoy the things you love. But know that without pain, there’s no gain. Sometimes you just have to pull yourself together, overcome procrastination and do things. Other times it’s wise to quit working altogether for a period of time and do other things. It’s a fine balance, and we all need to find our own.
Overcoming Procrastination
I won’t spend any time on this. But if you notice you are procrastinating, try to find why. Usually, procrastination is the result of some fear. Fear of poverty, fear of success, fear of outside opinions, etc… Try to find the root cause of your procrastination and fix that. Sometimes all it takes it’s to flip a switch in your mind and see a situation from a different prism. Other times the problem is deeper and requires more work.
One thing that definitely won’t help you is to beat yourself up. Just accept that we are all humans, imperfect and evolving. It’s important to put yourself on a long-term trajectory of growth and improvement. Even if you have moments where it feels like you are taking a step back, those moments allow you to take several steps forward, if you face whatever is causing you pain/suffering.
One book that I can’t recommend highly enough on this subject is Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. There’s a chapter on overcoming fears that is truly eye-opening.
To Post Or Not To Post?
This is a highly subjective thing. I noticed that when I posted frequent updates of my progress, that caused it to stall. Why? My theory is that every time I would post and get a positive response, my brain would take that dopamine rush as a sign that the project was “completed”. I would then lose motivation for a while, and not feel so encouraged to work on the environment.
One thing that helps is to have a close community of friends where you can share your work and get feedback.
Do you really need to make everything?
No. When I started this environment, I wanted to make the foliage too. But that’s something that I’m not particularly good at, and would take me a long time to achieve an okay result.
It was much more effective to grab a package on the Unreal marketplace. Not only I saved a ton of time investing a bit of money into a pack, but also got high-quality assets that I now can use on other projects too.
Use a time management tool
I personally enjoy Asana, but there are many great tools out there that you can use to have visibility of how far you are in your project. You don’t need to break down every little task, but it helps to have a place where you can see the big picture easily.
Finishing The Project
The power of polishing things
Most of my environments look okay’ish for most of the production time. But they really come together towards the end, when I take the time to do polish.
Things such as placing decals, little props, plants, effects etc… should be left to the end, and they can truly bring your environment to the next level.
You can hide seams with decals, you can smooth corners and crevices, and do a ton of work quickly all over the map to step everything up.
Trust the process, and know that you will get there in the end.
When to call it done
An art piece is never finished but abandoned, said a wise person.
We can work on something forever if we are looking for perfection. But it’s more effective to just bring the work to a stopping point.
It also works well to put yourself a firm deadline towards the end and stick to that. That will help you prioritize what really matters, and ignore the fluff.
Release it!
Get your project out there. Maybe you have a playable you can up for people to play around with? Take the feedback you get, and use that as inspiration for your next project!
Takeaway
Making a full game environment is a damn hard task!
Not only do you have to concept, visualize, design, model, texture, light, etc… an environment. You need to have the resilience to keep on pushing through and get to the end.
It can be very discouraging to open Artstation or Twitter and see a lot of environments being made, and think that you are a failure because you are not finishing anything.
But keep in mind that great things take time to make. You can’t measure how long it took someone to make something before they posted. Maybe they spent a hundred hours on a single prop. So do yourself a favor. Stop comparing yourself to others, and just enjoy what you are making! Enjoy the journey, and work hard to get better. Research, study, experiment, fail, persevere. Then one day you look back at your work and you are going to feel amazing about it because only you will know how hard it was to achieve that, and how much stronger you got because you persevered!
This article ended up much longer than I anticipated, but I hope it will be useful to you. Let me know below what you take away from this, and if this is something that you struggled with before too!
Have fun making art!
Thiago
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Yo man, Thiago, I love how candidly you express yourself. Although our views and philosophies may differ, your candidness just breaks that barrier and I learn a lot from you.
Thanks again :)
Well said! It's rough going through this process alone. Hearing what it's been like for you to learn environment art is inspiring and helps clear the head.