It's Not Dollars But Your Personal Investment

Isn't it interesting in indie game development when you see someone complain about the prices of the tools that they need to purchase (such as the game engine, programming or art tools) you just know that these same people will spend more than that in a year on upgrading/purchasing a new computer, buying books and training, accessing the internet on a fast high speed connection, paying for web hosting to promote their game or to run a SVN server for their team and many other things.

No one said making a game is supposed to be cheap or easy, it's a challenge that requires an huge investment. An investment financially and an investment from yourself to spend countless hours working on a dream you have and put in more blood, sweat and tears than you think you could possibly ever have. As such the real question people should be asking is not "How much does it cost to make a game?" but "How much of myself can I put into this so that I suceed?", and the true answer to that is far more than you can possibly expect. But then that is why making games isn't easy or cheap, that's why you don't see every joe bloe with a computer making a game for their best friends to play. If it was easy the magic that went into making it to deliver an entertaining experiance would be lost to its players.

Working with Mudbox 2009

So I finally bit the bullet and purchased a high resolution DCC (Digital Content Creation) application. As you can tell by the title of this post I ended up going with Mudbox (instead of Zbrush) and the main reason for this is that I ended up liking the UI and controls as well as the painting tools of Mudbox more than Zbrush. Not that it really matters much though as both applications are capable of producing the same incredible level of work.

My first week with the application was mostly spent experimenting more with the different tools, goofing around and getting more familar with some sort of workflow that I could employ. I didn't produce anything worthy of showing off though until I stumbled upon this Vimeo demonstration of Mudbox:


Concept Sculpting in Mudbox 2009 Tutorial from Wayne Robson on Vimeo.

After watching Wayne Robson use the application and seeing his techniques he employed I felt pretty inspired to start fresh and try something new. So for the past few evenings when I had some free time (which isn't a lot with a toddler) I would load up Wayne's tutorial on one Monitor and Mudbox on the other and get to work. After a lot of pausing, playing and rewinding to review segments of the video over and over again I ended up with my own creation:

What I ended up with was a bit of an amphibious lizard guy. While I know its far from perfect I am pretty pleased with the fact that I was able to begin producing something worthy of showing off. So a big thanks goes out to Wayne Robson for creating such a cool and inspirational video.