Author: Samuel Plum

Music 30/30 – Day 1

Ok, trying out a slightly different format, considering that I’m drifting away from a tight coupling between the days of the Journey and the days of the individual challenges. It made sense to have a single heading for the drawing challenge, and the 3d challenge was just 30 days off, so easy enough, but having day 62 correlate properly with day 1 just seems like too much to ask. And I think including a separate section header for the challenges should help organize talking about other things. Like website design… oh, wait.

Regardless, I think the challenge is off to a good start. Like I said yesterday, the two main goals are to learn some basic composition and music theory skills, and to learn some basic novice level keyboard playing skills. To accomplish the latter without a direct teacher I’ve picked up yet another Udemy course, this time on a “surefire” way to learn to play the piano quickly. We’ll see how it turns out. But being a gamer and an all around crazy person, I’m of course pushing it to the next level. I’m actually three levels deep with this stuff, it’s insane.

So, what I’m doing is as follows. The course covers a series of increasingly difficult chord progressions and rhythms, as they apply to a variety of popular or at least semi-recognizable tunes. These often have sheet music attached, or at the very least the basic pattern will have sheet music, which can then be transposed for the listed chord progressions. The idea is that you practice practice practice the progressions as you are shown, and then move on into the next one, slowly building up your skill and general knowledge level.

From my other course on music theory I’ve been tuned into a software package called Musescore, which allows you to write out sheet music, and has the added benefit of being able to both play it back, and export the music as a midi file. This is great, because taking the time to enscribe each of the practice pieces gives me practice at both reading and writing musical notation and gets me more familiar with the piece itself.

The final piece of the puzzle is a program called Synthesia. It’s essentially a Rock Band / Guitar Hero style rhythm game designed for MIDI keyboards connected to your computer, but it has the advantage of being able to import any midi file, including the ones that I can output from Musescore. So while I *could* just sit and practice the exercise pieces on my own, instead I can load them up in the game, and get perfect and instant feedback on how well I am playing them, and where I’m messing up. Synthesia lets you practice the melody, the rhythm, and each hand individually until you are ready to play everything together at full speed, and you can track your progress over time.

So far I think I like the plan.  I get to follow along with a prescribed course of study, I get multiple views into the song, practice at multiple levels, and quick feedback, all in one simple package. So today I managed to get my overall score on the first practice piece up to 59, which is not a bad start.

So, as I mentioned in the last post, today was a day off. Of course I’m apparently pretty bad at taking days off, so I still managed to get some learning in, covering a variety of different semi-related topics, including quite a lot of photography, but still overall it was a pretty laid back and relaxing time.

But, the time for relaxing is now over, and it’s back to work for me, starting with the launch into the next 30/30 challenge: Music. I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while, actually. I’ve been looking forward to all of them, if I’m being honest, but music has always held a special place in my life, and I do very much wish I was more musically inclined.

This challenge has a couple of main target goals. First and foremost is going to be gaining a rudimentary understanding of music theory and basic composition, with the goal of being able to produce simple but effective music tracks that can be used to augment my podcasts, videos, and games. I’m planning to gear my learning mostly toward video game music production strategies at this stage, primarily due to the similar usage as atmosphere building background music. I’m hoping to learn enough to be able to put together a competent composition, even if it isn’t anything super original or fancy, that can manage to tell a story of its own, to enhance its companion work.

The second goal is to gain a basic proficiency at playing the keyboard. I’ve owned a keyboard for years, and have never learned to play, which I’ve always thought was a shame, but up until this point not enough of a shame to actually sit down and take the time to learn. But, music composition goes a lot faster if you have a direct way of recording the music that you want, so knowing how to play the keys will be a big help in that regard. I’m hoping that by the end of the challenge I’ll have built up enough of a basic skill level to be able to reliably use the keyboard to get musical ideas into a digital audio workstation.

So, with the goals stated, let the challenge begin!

So, I bet you thought you were going to get a nice human sculpt render for today’s show off piece, didn’t you? Well, it turns out that I am straight out of time for that, so instead you get a nice out-of-time clock!

Honestly, I’m not complaining. The sculpt is coming along, but it still has a ways to go before it will be display ready, and I just couldn’t pass up the idea of the clock signifying the end of the 30/30 challenge. Successful end, if I do say so myself, and I do. As with all of these challenges, I’m far from being a master, but I think I’ve managed to make some really cool stuff, and I’ve learned some good techniques, so I’m way better off than when I started.

In other news, I made a game! 

You can also reach it at https://thetalorian.itch.io/flight-of-light. The concept is simple, the gameplay is simple, but it’s actually pretty fun, and I’d say not bad for having been made by a novice solo developer with only self-made assets over the course of six days, and in my spare time while still concentrating on learning sculpting.

So, game jam done, and 3d 30/30 done. What’s next? The plan is to move on to the next 30/30, of course. This time: Music! Time to move away from the visual arts for a bit and get into some emotional expression. After I take a day off. It’s been sixty straight days so far, I think I’ve earned it, and it will put the new 30/30 running exactly through the month of September, so that should be nice.

The game jam game, now working under its final title of “Flight of Light” is nearing completion in starts and sputters. It’s pretty close to a final product, and actually a fairly decent and playable game at this point, albeit an exceptionally simplistic one. And while things are progressing well, it also seems like every new fix or addition brings on additional setbacks and road blocks.

For example, when I tried to do a test build yesterday I realized that the size the game was showing me on my monitor from the engine editor was not actually the size that it would be played in when it got to the browser. I’m not entirely sure what’s up with that. But it meant actually buckling down and changing everything up to work at different resolutions, a step that I had skipped for time, knowing that I was planning to only use the one view.

And that led to the possibility that the actual image ratio of the game window could potentially change as well, so I decided to put in some indication of the sidewalls, blocking in the character to the actual game field rather than just having the window do it. And of course that led to several camera changes, a perspective shift, resizing, realigning, etc. Basically changes all over the place.

This evening I buckled down and tried to improve the sound track. The game’s music is semi-randomly generated from essential building blocks following some basic level music theory, but the initial set of blocks I’ve been working with were fairly disjointed and honestly kind of a rush job, meant to test the concept more than anything. Overall it mostly worked, but I thought I could improve on the formula.

The new building blocks are in nearly every way superior. For one, they are actually polyphonic, so each block has multiple instruments playing, and they are more cohesive and following a tighter pattern. In the audio workstation it actually sounds pretty nice. I even added a drum line to it.

The problem is that now that the soundtrack is a bit less chaotic, it’s much more apparent that it isn’t playing back consistently in the game itself. Like it’s development, the soundtrack has stops and sputters, moments where it can’t quite load it in time to play the next segment. With the higher consistency in the melody lines and the percussion added in each delay becomes super obvious, so now if I want to use my enhanced soundtrack, I’ll have to figure out a way to smooth out the audio playback.

It’s ok, I’ve still got a day left to get it right.

As for the 3d challenge, I once again have nothing to show off. I feel like the new sculpt is actually coming along pretty nicely, but I’m beginning to think that it was probably a mistake to attempt right before the end of the challenge, as I doubt I will be able to complete it to my satisfaction before the challenge is over, and in the meantime I continue to have text only updates. It’s going to make the big “finale” vlog video pretty barren as well. Ah well, live and learn I suppose. And learning is the entire point. Maybe I’ll have something finished up enough to show off, we’ll have to see.

Just a very quick (and very late!) update for day 58. I’m putting a lot of focus on sculpt practice here toward the end of the challenge, at least with the time I’m not spending working on the Game Jam.

As a result, today’s practice was another attempt at a full human figure, one of the harder subjects, at least with my still currently shaky understanding of anatomy. But I’m practicing new techniques. I decided to try out building a more solid base mesh for sculpting this time, while still using the pre-supplied rig for proportions. The general plan seemed sound, but I built it out using a variety of different shapes, planning to just merge them together with the boolean tools since I already knew I’d be adding dynamic topology, so I didn’t need to worry too much about the odd topology you usually get from those.

At first everything seemed to be going really well, I had a vaguely human shaped mesh, all ready for sculpting, and got to work. I had no problems at all getting the basic shapes down for the feet and legs, smoothed out the connections between the legs, hips, and torso, but then I got to the shoulders and everything fell apart fast. Apparently the boolean tools, in combination with my original shaping methods, had left a bunch of interior faces and unconnected vertices. Basically the entire thing was a whole huge mess that took forever to get cleaned up.

I feel like the method could work out with a bit of practice, and might end up being faster than some of the other things I’ve done. Someday. But not today. I did end up with a decent if super-low detail starting point for tomorrow. So that’s something.

I’m fairly pleased with the progress so far on the gamejam entry. My little game, at least currently titled Phoenix Rise, though I’m debating other options, is actually pretty much a real game at this point. Still a bit buggy, and certainly light on the content, but it’s a game. It’s got a proper start screen, and end screen, a score meter, a moving player character, viable obstacles, useful game pickups, and at least a very rudimentary form of difficulty progression along with a loss condition. No real win condition, but that was never a part of the plan, it was designed to be a “beat your own best” sort of experience. And it’s even mildly engaging.

And that means that I have four days left to polish it up. I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to complete, but I’d like to get a lot more level variety, as well as just general polish on the graphics overall. Right now I have no background images, and my obstacles are just simple blocks. I’d love to get some fire effects on my phoenix, and ideally get its wings flapping. And I’m hoping that I can get some more advanced music in there. I’ve got something mildly decent right now, but it is very basic and chiptune sounding, I’d love to try to get something overall a bit more epic sounding. I don’t know, maybe that’s too much, if I keep the music in a chiptune style it will work well with other low-poly, low fidelity style assets, which may be better given the time constraints. I can always come back and make an HD version of the game after the jam is over, and once I’ve made it through my music 30/30.

Speaking of the 30/30, I’m pretty happy with the result of today’s sculpting practice. Not specifically because I think it’s good, though I’m not disappointed with the outcome, but more because it’s not absolutely terrible, and it’s something that I’ve been wanting to sculpt from the very beginning.

The last time I tried to sculpt a squirrel it wasn’t even remotely recognizable, and while this one could certainly be better (and I’m sure I could probably improve it with a bit more time than I’m giving myself for it) I think it’s at least recognizable, and pretty decent.

Also, lesson learned, or at least a firm reminder given. Always save your work. Being me I decided that my little squirrel here needed fur. I’ve never actually tried to use blender’s fur particle systems to create actual fur, but I was willing to try. Trying out a test render in the viewport crashed the application, and for a minute there I was pretty sure all of that sculpt work had gone to waste, and my poor squirrel was no more. Fortunately I was able to recover from an autosave, so crisis averted, but that was a bit too close. Apparently remembering to save often as I go is another skill that I need to get back into the habit of doing, it’s funny how the old ways start to slip when you spend a lot of your time working in things that autosave.

Today’s task was actually pretty interesting. By suggestion, I decided to go with trying to create a pie. It was a pretty good session, really made me think about the tools at my disposal and how I could use them to achieve the effects that I needed.

All in all, I think it came out alright.

The game for the gamejam is progressing, albeit slowly. I came up with an interesting idea for difficulty progression, that I’m hoping to get a chance to try to implement tomorrow, but for today I was working on actually incorporating the light theme into the game by adding the growing and shrinking light effects. It is partially done at this point, and I’m just that much closer to having a working playable concept.

I feel like I made some pretty decent progress on the gamejam entry, despite not having a lot of time to put into it. I managed to properly import my phoenix model after a bit of fighting with the exporters, and set up the basic control structures and even added some simple random obstacles and a game over condition. It’s actually pretty close to being a complete playable game at this stage, just in need of a lot of polish.

But, game development is not the same thing as practicing my skills in 3d art creation, so I made sure to also put my time in on Blender, today choosing to stick to my light theme and model out a candle. It covers a bit of modeling, a bit of sculpting, some curve modeling, texture work, and a bit of playing around with Blender’s fire and smoke simulation, so all in all a pretty decent practice piece.

Today’s project is directly related to a new side experiment. I’ve entered into my first ever Game Jam, as hosted by the Brackey’s Discord community. Seven days to make a functional game around the theme of light, without using any premade assets or code. It should be an interesting learning experience.

I haven’t decided yet exactly what my game is going to entail. I know it will have to be exceedingly simple, since I’m a single dev with next to no actual experience and a very short deadline. My first thought with the theme, though, was that I should try to incorporate a phoenix into the game. Because it would cover multiple interpretations of the theme of light. Being on fire, it automatically covers physical illumination. Being a mythical creature, and often considered wise, we have allusions to metaphysical illumination. And by virtue of being a bird, it is naturally light in the sense of not being terribly heavy. I may not stick with it if the eventual game design doesn’t have room for one, but for the time being it seems ok. And it gave me a subject for tonight’s modeling session.

I’m not at all happy with the way the material came out, and I’ve still got a lot to learn about rigging and posing to prevent the bone roll from going all over the place, but I was pretty impressed that I managed to actually pull off a recognizable bird shape with basic low-poly modeling.

Today’s practice was really just going to be the mushroom, I swear.

A week or so ago, I was watching someone on youtube during a sculpting timelapse of a strange mushroom character that they were working on. They weren’t really explaining anything, it wasn’t really a tutorial, just showing their process as they made this creature, but during the course of it they got to the frills in the underside of the mushroom cap, and did some kind of magic trickery to separate out a large selection of edges to let them make the frills. I had no idea how they had pulled that off until I watched a video walkthrough on how to model a microphone.

At first thought you may assume that a microphone would be super easy, it’s just a basic sphere on a stick, right? But then you remember that a lot of mics, especially the classic stage mics, have a curved wire mesh around that ball, and that’s something that’s complicated to reproduce accurately, unless you have a good technique. And wouldn’t you know it, the technique that they used involved taking a selection of points, and unselecting every other one, using the checkerboard deselect option, an option that I had not realized was there, and which is almost certainly what the other guy used to create his mushroom cap frills.

So fast forward to today, and I’m doing a bit of light sketching for my sketchbook (see, I told you that would still be happening) and I draw a rock that looks vaguely mushroom shaped. So then I draw a mushroom. And another. It just seemed like a mushroom kind of day. And then I remembered that I know how to do the frills now, and at that point modeling a mushroom was really the only viable option for tonight’s practice.

But the mushroom itself is pretty simple, maybe overly simple, so I decided that I also wanted to put some nice textures on it, and do some simple rigging so I could have a few of them in different positions and poses. And then I needed some ground to put it on, so I had to model some dirt, and put together a particle system that could properly duplicate and distribute some grass that I made.

I think the end result looks pretty nice, maybe the most professional render I’ve produced yet. Certainly one of the slowest, at least for a single frame. Still, I kind of wish I had had more time to put into it, even if it is a really simple scene. It would have been nice to have some rocks around, maybe a rotten log. Better definition on the ground, too, since that didn’t really come across well in the final render. It’s heartening, though, knowing that I’m getting to a point where I at least pretty much know what to do, or how to pull off what I need. And the more I do this the faster I’ll be able to produce nice results, so maybe it won’t be too long before I can start to add in those extra details without it taking forever.