top of page
Search

How I started my journey

  • Writer: Game Art Blog
    Game Art Blog
  • Nov 25, 2017
  • 5 min read

Updated: Nov 27, 2017

~This article will not be for everyone. If you don't want to hear about how I got into 3D art feel free to check out the other articles that are available here at the game art blog~


The start of a journey

Initially I wasn't a very avid gamer. I would play the odd flash game online or go round my friends house and play call of duty. I had a PlayStation 2 but gaming didn't seem to be something I had a great love for at first sight. It grew when I started playing games such as: Grand theft auto San Andreas, Vice city and the Simpsons hit and run on the ps2. I loved these games but I didn't find a true passion for games until I started going around my friends house to play Call of Duty on their ps3. Many of my friends had a ps3 but I could justify the purchase. Eventually I asked for a ps3 for Christmas once the prices had dropped on them a bit. From there I fell in love even though Call of Duty was the only real series I played for a great deal of time.


When it comes to the creative side me, I was definitely lacking. I felt, if I couldn't draw I was naturally untalented. My art teacher in year 7 (6th grade) was an inspiration to me. (This was my first year in secondary school). She was a really nice person and somewhat brought out my creative side. Despite this her art lessons still didn't really stick with me and I sucked. During this time I found a program called moviestorm. It was a tool where you could create your own animated movies with preset animations. I thought this was really cool and continued to make really bad short films with the software. From there I though animation or film making would be my thing. I experimented with live action film making and stop motion animation but I knew myself this was all a phase. Time went by and I knew I wanted to do something with my life but I didn't know what. My mindset started to change and my school grades started to improve but it just felt worthless because I didn't know what I wanted to do. One day I decided it would be cool to learn how to make games.


I found a software called gamesalad but at the time I had the ambition of making IOS games because I recently got a iPad. As a result I bought myself an old mac book G4. Because I was young and stupid I didn't do my research properly. The laptop couldn't run the software and you needed a license to develop for ios. I later sold my macbook and got a gaming PC around the same time. It was the new thing apparently and my friend persuaded me to get one. I had so much fun and loved it a lot more than my ps3. All my money went into that, i'd saved for ages and was glad I enjoyed it so much but at the time I didn't realize how much of an impact it would have in my life.


Because of my failed attempt with the macbook my cousin kindly lent me her mac mini. There I created my first game using a gamesalad template. I had so much fun learning how to code using gamesalad's block coding. I was so proud even though in reality it wasn't that hard.


ree

Image: The game in question

All the sprites in the game were not made by me. I only coded part of the game with gamesalad's simple block code.


After creating this I went on to create more 2d games but from scratch using my own assets. They were terrible but I found something creative and productive that i love doing. After creating a plethora of 2D games I started to dabble in 3d with the unity game engine. I learned to code quite a bit with unity and later got referred to a friend of my cousins that creates apps. He taught me how to code a bit with apples xcode. He wanted to work with me to develop an app. Although I was having fun I knew this wasn't what I wanted to do. I went back to game development but this time went all in creating 3d games in unity. I was having fun coding but I felt like my games were being held back in the visual department so I started to learn 3d and photoshop. I tried blender but I couldn't get into it so the next choice was a student copy of maya. 3ds max was another option but that's not available on mac so I started to learn Autodesk Maya with online tutorials. I started to really enjoy modelling as I can see what I'm creating in real time and monitor my progress. To spend more time on modelling I used free unity assets to make my games with just bits of coding on my part for custom events. At this time I had no sense of optimization so my game started to get laggy real quick and that held me back a bit but I was enjoying myself.


A game I started creating that fell through very quickly (not all assets were created by me):


A game I put more time into:



Most assets were created by me but not all. Most of the coding was free off the unity store.


As you can see it's very bad but I learned a lot from just practicing, doing my own thing and having fun. After creating this i started to drift away from game development and focus more on my 3d art skills because it became clear to me that that's what I wanted to peruse.

I tried a verity of styles!


Cartoon:


ree

Hand Painted:


ree

3D rendering:


ree

Whatever this is:


ree

Experimental?:


ree

As you can see a lot of this is god awful. Trust me, there was probably some projects that looked a lot worse.


My first real breakthrough was this image:


ree

It was inspired by a piece of concept art from naughty dog's game, the last of us. I created everything from scratch including the brick texture and I was pretty pleased with myself. I'd like to say this piece was planned a lot but it wasn't. I just made it up as I went along and I believe that's the best thing to do when you're learning. From here I just kept creating and every so often I created something pretty good and I still believe in that today. Just keep creating.


I appreciated that this article was a boring one but I hope you've took something away from it. If you take one thing away from this i'd say, just keep creating, eventually you'll make something amazing.


I haven't touched upon my college education in this article as I'd like to talk about it in a different blog post so stay tuned for that. Follow my instagram or email list to get notified when that's available.


Best Reagrds

~Ross Hankinson~

 
 
 

1 Comment


James
James
Aug 18

Really inspiring to read about how you started your journey and the challenges you overcame along the way. Stories like these truly motivate others to keep going and follow their own paths. By the way, if you’re into relaxing activities during free time, you might also enjoy playing Bus Simulator Indonesia apk.

Like

bottom of page