Posted By HolyAvengerOne at 10:53 AM - Mon May 20 2019 >
If that last assertion is true, wouldn't it mean that you do already have a metric ton of art/effects/environment elements already done? And thus, could you not show us a lot more of prelyria for basically no additional work?
We don't really like pulling in a bunch of placeholders from outside. We do it from time to time where it makes sense, but generally speaking it doesn't actually save you any time, because none of those assets are actually built to comply with CoE constraints/needs, meaning they all have to be hand adjusted by an artist anyway. At this level of fidelity, the time necessary to tweak an external asset to fit is about the same as the time necessary to build one, so unless there's very little tweaking to be done with an external asset, there's really no point in spending money to acquire it and then spending money to modify it when it'd be cheaper to just make the low-fidelity placeholder in-house. Even if it just saves $20, that's $20 we can use to keep the lights on, so to speak -- wasting it doesn't do us any good, but someday that $20 could be a life or death savings. To have it and not need it, and all that.
As for what we have to show vs. what we don't: There are lots of thing going on right now, so in theory there's lots we can show, but our focus is on implementing and building mechanic. That means that all the assets we have are generally in service of that goal. Basically, some stuff shows better than others.
Not gonna lie though: I write the shinies, so what gets shown is often as much about what I happened to be working on that week as it is about what's going to look good. I've been told by members of the community countless times that they'd rather I talk shop than just see a shiny, so that's been my focus for the last couple of months. Sometimes that means a gif or a video but, outside my role as lead designer, I'm primarily a systems designer, so sometimes that means a flow chart or the output of a tool I've custom written to run a simulation and generate metadata that is used by the backend systems of the game. Folks have been pretty critical of showing eye candy in the past, so unless it's explicitly asked for, like the architecture concepts, I'm trying to stay away from showing something just because it looks cool. I want something cool that fits the work i'm doing, but I'll settle for something that just fits the work I'm doing if "something cool" doesn't quite apply.
I see the thursday shinies as a way to update everyone on what's going on with my side of the house, so to speak, and I show what's germane to that.
Posted By HolyAvengerOne at 10:58 AM - Mon May 20 2019
Isn't the whole art right now just a placeholder? Or you mean "indicative of the final display" of the ph itself? Or do you mean that towards the final final display?
Just trying to wrap my head around this whole client deal here :) Thanks in advance.
In this particular case I mean, "Yeah, so when I implemented the HUD, we didn't have any art assets for it, so I just opened up photoshop and threw together some imagery that kind of fit into the overall UI layout design so that I could demonstrate that the display works and move on to implementing other functionality." - It's literally just a functional placeholder with no thought towards overall aesthetic other than "this fits where the widget will really go." It may not even be the right size for the intended alpha-final UI styling, since I literally just eyeballed it.
Hope that helps! :)