Hello, my name is Dima, I’m 30 years old and now I’ll tell you how… but actually you already read the title of the topic and came for my story. It’s probably worth starting with the fact that the last time I wrote essays was at school ~15 years ago and I hope this text will be at least a little readable. I will also say that everything written below is dedicated to my life path, the road to game development and all sorts of experiences; there will be nothing here about the development itself (but it will be in the following materials). Happy reading.
Dream
Having fired the last shot at Max Payne, having improved the lives of all the peasants in Stronghold, scattering advertising leaflets in GTA Vice City and obliterating every issue of Gambling Mania, I, twelve years old (I don’t remember exactly, but I think I was 12 then), had an epiphany – I would be a game developer, my time had come. Based on various articles and workshops in “Gaming”, I realized that I needed some kind of program called 3D MAX. After a bunch of trips to different shops and stores in my city, pestering every seller that I urgently need a disk with the program here and now (oh, these children…) finally, I find the treasured CD with the software I need – discreet 3ds max 6 SP1 Russian + English version + a collection of the latest plugins! All that’s left to do is ask Dad to install the program and start making your own game. And if with the first everything went smoothly, then with the second stage, how can I tell you this… in general, I could not transfer the game level and the monsters from my head to the computer via USB, and the most difficult thing I can do in 3ds max is a teapot (those who understand understand). Filled with disappointment, I told everything to my parents and they advised me to look for educational books on the program, in the manner of “Windows for Dummies.”. Stage No. 2 began, but not with a disk, but with a book, fortunately there were many bookstores in the city center and I quickly found a book on 3ds max 7. Unlike school literature, no one forced me to study this book, I happily read it and repeated everything as it was said in the book, but I had exactly one problem, which, like a snowball, got worse and worse with each new time – sometimes, when I didn’t understand something, I spent a lot of time analyzing it, but in the end I just skipped over incomprehensible tasks and moved on until the book said “repeat what you did in the last chapter,” and often that’s what I I didn’t understand, and in the end, after a dozen such omissions, I no longer understood anything at all, and the hundredth re-reading did not give anything. Now looking back, I think I should have tried to use the Internet, which I had had since 2002, but besides watching Masyanya, I didn’t know what else to do with it. At some point I realized that the end of my training had come, I don’t understand anything about this “Max” and what the hell with it, a new GTA is coming out soon with a black man in the lead role and this is what I’ll bang in it!
I was able to dig up photos of that same disk and book
Youth
Scatter the pearls of time in the sea of emptiness
From your bag of seconds sewn together with threads
No matter how hard I try, with both hands
You won’t hit rock bottom… yet
As time passed, in addition to playing games, I devoted a lot of time to game editors: the first Far Cry, Titan Quest, TES 4: Oblivion, but most of all I spent on modifying GTA San Andreas, even using my lack of knowledge of 3ds max to add my buildings to the game; after another 1,000,000 trials and errors I was even able to write a simple mission for the game (again, thanks to the old “Gaming Mania” and sites with similar topics). Here it is worth clarifying that 95% of everything I did was slag and a simple change in the physics of the car in the notepad (for GTA), namely changing the value from 15 to 25, seemed like an unrealistic modification, making me a developer of a worthy Rockstar Games.
My map for Far Cry. It’s a pity that everything I did for San Andreas was not preserved .
Now there will be a small digression, but I consider it important for the whole story and we will talk about my parents. Father is a strict workaholic, mother is a kind workaholic, they tried their best to turn a mini-counter at the market into 5 food stores with several wagons of sugar in stock. It seems that they have a “life in chocolate”, and then the day comes when they simply take and gradually close their entire business. I never understood it! Drive further along the rails and make money, to the question “Why did you do this?", the answer is – we are stupidly tired (remember these words, we will return to them later), tired of changing sellers every couple of months, tired of the loader getting drunk and not coming to work. As a result, my father became a videographer, and my mother began selling lingerie, where there would be only one seller, herself.
As often happens, I began to help my father in video filming various kinds of celebrations, from birthdays to weddings. Uuuhhhhh… I could write a whole article about how much I hated this business, but we are talking about something else; don’t worry we’ll get back to the topic soon, a little more.
During this period, my parents made a big mistake in my upbringing – for all the hundreds of video works that I helped make, they didn’t pay me a penny, all I heard was “Dima, do you see food on the table? It didn’t just appear” or “Who bought you a new computer?? Father Frost?"and other nonsense that will come back to haunt my mother in a couple of years.
I hated school, I was a so-so student, but at the end of the year I always used all my skills to improve my D’s to C’s, and my C’s to B’s, and for some reason I always succeeded. My whole problem with school was that I didn’t understand why it was needed, why all these cosines and X numbers, this is total nonsense, and after the ninth grade I was put in a group with in-depth knowledge of the subject of history. We had 11! stories per week! Believe it or not, I walked around with a small pillow so that I could calmly sleep on the last desk for that missing hour. At the same time, my parents decided to separate; and by the end of the tenth grade, your mother began to ask where you would go to study after the eleventh, and in general who you want to be? But this was the whole “salt”, that without the pressure of my workaholic father, without holding “real” money in my hands for all the years of helping my parents, and in my aimless existence as a teenager, I didn’t want to be anyone, and given that I want to be nothing, then I won’t go to university!
All my time, from this point until I was 20 years old, was occupied with partying, watching movies, partying, reading books (not fiction) and partying, and of course, playing computer games. What could be better than hanging on your mother’s neck, knowing that you will never work, because work kills horses and in general the word “work” comes from the word “slave”.
The turning point
Love will help you bloom and wither, it will devour you like an aphid flower, but it’s better to die like that than to never love anyone
Once I started courting a girl, it all dragged on and eventually grew into a full-fledged relationship. She had a degree in design and then one day she said that few people would hire her in her profession without knowing “3D Max” and then memories came into my head that I learned something like this as a child and that we installed this “program” in the evening, let’s try to figure it out together. No sooner said than done! The program is installed, the first lesson for beginners is open and… all the guys, I understand THIS IS IT! That’s what I’m interested in doing! This is how I can make money in the long run. And this time I have the key – the Internet, it turns out, is not only for downloading Masyanya and watching strawberries, but it also has lessons on any topic, including 3ds Max, if I had a desire, but I had it and whatnot.
Nearest 2.I spent 5 years studying, it could have been faster, but no one was pushing me and I could just have fun studying the programs. I watched and read all the tutorials that came my way, it didn’t matter if it was about 3ds max or Marvelous Designer, the topic was about setting up light or glass material in stained glass windows; my opinion is that any knowledge that you received voluntarily will be useful to you sooner or later and unnecessary things, besides school and institute, almost do not exist. Somewhere in the middle of the training, having tried everything a little bit, I decided to decide on the final vector of my 3D movement. As in any profession, there are a lot of directions in 3D and my choice fell on architectural visualization. A few words about what this is – this is when a designer (I’m not a designer) draws up a floor plan (restaurant, hotel, apartment, supermarket…) with the arrangement of furniture (what company, what material of the sofa upholstery…) and all the characteristics of the walls, floor, ceiling; will there be a rail ceiling light or regular spots and what kind of flower do they want in the top right corner. Wait Dima, why architectural visualization and not gaming direction?? It’s good that you asked, I’ll answer – when I already had some 3D skills, I found out that no one makes characters in 3ds max and for this there is Zbrush (if you see some hero, monster or other digital monster in a game or movie, know that it was made in Zbrush), for more convenient use/learning of the “program” I got a graphics tablet (thanks mom). I soon came to the conclusion that it would be nice for Zbrush to learn how to draw (it trains imagination, perspective and much more), and most importantly, to learn human anatomy correctly. But all this took time, and a lot of time, I’ll tell you, it’s not that visualization didn’t take time, but if I already knew something there, then in “organic” I was a complete zero and could only sculpt non-existent “monsters” from other planets; and despite the fact that no one urged me, I myself wanted to quickly get off my mother’s neck, earn money, buy a new computer and start living separately, with my woman (with the one who “returned” 3ds max to me).
First https://admiralsharkcasino.uk/mobile-app/ steps in 3ds’max take 2
Once I finished training on crampons, I moved on to advanced lessons
It’s time to go
Despite the fact that my goal was freelancing, I decided to look for orders in my city in order to understand how everything works and not mess it up in the future. After a bunch of advertisements, I found something vaguely similar to what I needed – a company for iron forging and production of paving slabs. I came for a sort of “interview”, a man sat there and said that before me there was a girl who occupied this place, but, such a brute, she got pregnant and now we need a new person who will visualize the work projects and give an estimate on how many tiles need to be made. I asked again, “I’m preparing an estimate?", I was told "Yes; and if you miscalculate, you pay for the extra out of your own pocket.”. After a moment of stupor, I thought that there shouldn’t be many problems with this and some AutoCAD will do it in no time. Towards the end of the conversation, the man’s phone rang and he made me happy that we were now going to the site and this would be my first order. The task was to photograph the front side of a private house, make a new entrance gate in 3D and integrate it into the photo. Arriving home, I immediately began to deal with this task, simultaneously thinking, “I will pay for miscalculations in the estimate from my own pocket.”? Why the hell do I need this?! I want to make visualizations of cool cottages in Miami, and not go to sites and stand like a cretin with a piece of paper and a pen, drawing some kind of gate!». In the end, I did what was needed from me (it didn’t take much time), without even demanding money, I said that I wasn’t going to work for him, goodbye.
Then I was “lucky” to learn from friends and acquaintances that people who make furniture need visualization of their products. In general, this is a common practice (and in the future I will have more than one such order), but probably any beginner should first go through a “baptism of fire”, because it was HELL! There were 15 products, they wanted 3 angles of each product in 5 different materials and at the end we get ~250 finished pictures! When everything was ready, during the final rendering I had to stupidly go up every 15 minutes and put a new picture on the render, and so on 250 times. In the intermediate stage everything was also “fun”, since they make furniture, I was required to be accurate to the millimeter, although in the pictures this does not matter, length 1155 mm. or 1155.2 mm. A billion edits and not understanding what they themselves wanted drove me into a quiet rage; and everything would be fine, you know what the main fun was? The fact is that in the end I received such insignificant pennies for the work done that as soon as the project was completely finished, I deleted EVERYTHING that connected me with it.
After two attempts to find something in the city, I decided to make myself a portfolio and look for orders remotely. When everything, including me, was ready, I began to “storm” foreign freelance exchanges (I almost didn’t consider Russian-speaking ones, since they pay less).
The main “enemy” of this kind of freelancing is a million Indians who rush to any project that interests you and offer a price and terms 100 times lower than yours, and in general no one wants to deal with a newcomer, but what can you do, it’s hard to find orders, but it’s realistic and so little by little I became an architectural visualizer, a freelancer.
My portfolio with which I was looking for orders
But, whatever one may say, due to the fact that I did not have enough orders, sometimes I looked for companies in my country that work remotely. And then one day I found what I needed! I will divide the next 6 years into 3 parts.
Part 1 (Hurray!)
Having received the first order (from this company), I felt an unreal responsibility, I am such a person myself (when it comes to work issues), but here I wanted to get the most out of myself and after six working days, one sleepless night and a whole bunch of internal experiences, the project was delivered, the office was happy, the main customer was happy, and I was paid $500 (the project was not small); to say that I was pleased is to say nothing, I cannot describe in words how tired and happy I was at the same time. Not only did they help me in every possible way (they explained everything I didn’t understand and provided everything I asked for), but they also paid me well; and a couple of days later they wrote “Dima, are you taking on a new project?", you can guess what my answer was.
The next 2 working years were good; I started and finished each project in about 7 days and, despite the fact that, due to my slowness and perfectionism, I could often stay up all night or go to bed late and get up early, I had four days between projects, during which I could “sleep” as long as I wanted or play on the computer all day. In general, having a free schedule, approximately 18 working days and 12 days off + a normal salary, it was a sin to complain about life. The working environment in this “company” was more reminiscent of a chat of friends who are doing the same thing and the management (if you can call it that) was absolutely no different from the performers.
At the same time, I noticed one thing that, looking ahead, will destroy me in the future – I never refused projects, there were times of blockage, when there were not enough workers and everyone knew that there was a plan B, that’s me. Somehow it got to the point where I was doing 3 projects in parallel, and despite sleepless nights and unreal fatigue, I was a guarantee that everything would be ready at the appointed time, even if the last edits arrived at 8 pm, and the main customer, on the other side of the world, had a meeting with the client at 9 am, everything would be ready and served “on a silver platter”. To the question “Why did you do this?“I can’t give an exact answer; “Well, everything is clear with you, you just love money” is not the correct answer; no, of course, I was subconsciously warmed by the fact that my efforts were adequately paid, but to put finances first, this was definitely not the case. Probably, parental genes, childhood images of how mom and dad plow so that something happens and the simple desire to be a good, responsible performer stood at the forefront of everything.
To sum it up, as stated above, it was a good few years until my “management” suddenly announced that they wanted to move on to something else and were leaving us completely, handing over their responsibilities to our best visualizer (not me).
Overall, the next couple of years didn’t change much, except, let’s say, my mood. The friendly atmosphere in the chat has become “dry” and exclusively work-related (this is how the departure of several important people destroys the entire atmosphere of the crowd), there are more projects, and less free time; remote freelancing was slowly turning into a “factory”, and the memory of 12 free days was a dream that I saw after another sleepless night. And in general, when you are 25+, everything pops into your head, from the fact that the grass was greener before, to the search in your head for the meaning of life..
Several of my commercial works
Part 2 (The train slows down)
And so you live your life, and then bam, and COVID 19. You yourself know how it was, the world is in decline, there is no work. For the first half of the year I didn’t see any significant changes in the number of projects, but then they became less and less. With the advent of free time, I began to clean the apartment more often, go outside, see relatives and friends, and this was just the beginning… After playing several games, I thought it was stupid to waste time, blew the dust off the graphics tablet (all this time it had been lying idle), launched Zbrush and began sculpting a predator from the film of the same name. I felt an incredible thrill when the space hunter was ready, and I was very pleased with the result. Then the time came for what I had been wanting for a long time – Unreal Engine 4 was gaining popularity in narrow circles of visualizers, an interactive walk is always cooler than a static picture. The program has been downloaded, a bunch of lessons have been prepared, let’s go!
Transferring a finished project to Unreal Engine 4
During the entire training, my brain was in seventh heaven, all the rusty neurons were in motion again, and getting the desired result after a hundred failures injected so much endorphin that I wanted to jump and scream like a little child who received a New Year’s gift. And then one day I thought – they make games in UE4, do you remember you once wanted to do something like this, maybe you’ll see how everything works there? And I looked, guys, what I saw amazed me, I started thinking about game development again and spent all my free time on lessons and podcasts dedicated to “game development”, and then I received the message “Dima, are you taking on a new project?"..
Imagine a city made of papier-mâché that is burned with napalm, or a hundred-meter tower built from plates that falls and breaks into pieces, that’s what I felt at that moment. On one side of the scale I had a childhood dream, and on the other “adult” obligations. “Okay, now you spend a couple of years on training and the first game, who knows how people will greet it; what will you eat all this time?? Who will pay for the house?? Go and make your woman happy that now you are an indie developer and everything is now on her shoulders, although it is your man’s duty to provide for your family,” this was all flying through my head, but… I voluntarily “put the collar back on” and with the thoughts “someday later” I took on the project. As time passed, I realized that I could not concentrate on both my studies and projects, finally deciding to choose the latter.
Although there was work, it was not enough and I was not happy with it. “Why the hell are our “managers” not doing anything, why are they needed at all?” I asked, and after a while I decided to leave the team and start a solo flight.
Part 3 (Icarus flies towards the sun)
By this time I was already a “grated kalach” and starting to work with customers directly was not a problem. The projects became bigger and more interesting, the pay was higher, and despite the fact that I remained the same crazy workaholic, I could make my schedule more flexible. And then at one point a new customer writes to me, says that he is recruiting visualizers to work remotely and would I like to join?. I didn’t need additional projects, but the conditions were very good and I decided to work with them for a month and then leave.
From that day on, I could say I started working two jobs. Responsibility did not allow me to do anything carelessly and I always gave the maximum that I could. Now I will describe my usual day at that time:
9:00 getting up in the morning so that by 11:00 (the beginning of the working day for customer No. 2) there are the necessary files that I did not have time to do yesterday
11:00 I dropped the files, I continue the project for customer No. 1, because at 15:00 I have to show pictures according to their project
18:30 I throw off everything or everything that I managed to do to customer No. 2, if I haven’t done everything, I say that there is a lot of everything and I’ll send it off tomorrow by the beginning of the working day
19:00 I receive edits from customer No. 1, I say that they will be ready tomorrow by 15:00; I’m starting to make these changes
This is a retelling of an ordinary, not stressful day, when everything goes “like clockwork”; as you can understand, such days were not always, I would even say not often. Remember that I just wanted to “play around” for a month with customer No. 2? Forget it! At the end of the month I received payment (Ha! And he said I don’t care about money!) and thought that in general, I’m made of iron, it’s hard, yes, but I’ll last 4 years at two jobs, and then I’ll take a break.
And this is what it led me to – I can easily stay awake for 2 nights, I need to get everything done; fall asleep at 4, wake up at 8, but it’s a holiday, I even slept; don’t go outside for 3 weeks, no problem, but on the weekends I need to get everything done in advance so that I can sleep at night on weekdays; I removed trips to the gym, but why, the farthest I go is the toilet; There is no point in writing about games and films. And here are 2 more cases, as the quintessence of this period of life:
My birthday, when everyone gathers at 10 am, and I do a project until 7 am and go to my friends for nothing. Cool, isn’t it??
One day, customer No. 2 flew to my country and arranged an entertaining “business meeting”. The day before the event, I worked on a project for customer No. 1 until the evening, then the train to the capital took 8 hours; and despite the fact that all the guys got together and walked in the morning, I sat in a cafe until 16 o’clock and did a project for customer No. 1, then, as if nothing had happened, I went to the party. The next day there are more festivities, in the evening 8 hours on the train and I’m home; I’m finishing the project for customer No. 1 before morning. So rested, so rested.
My calculations for 4 years turned out to be incorrect, after 8 months my brain was melted, I was in a bad state, I was going crazy from new orders, and had fits of rage from endless edits; I was sick of holding the phone in my hand while eating in the kitchen, and receiving finance did not evoke absolutely any emotions. I tried to delegate my tasks several times, but the worries that “if you want to do it well, do it yourself” ate me up and in the end I gave up hiring freelancers. Realizing that this couldn’t continue, I went on a two-week vacation and made a decision: upon my return I would take fewer orders!
Having done everything as I wanted, I can say that it has become better; I had free time, I returned to the gym, and there were fewer sleepless nights, but the problem was different – I just hated architectural visualization, I was disgusted by launching 3ds max and the nightmare about the “factory” became a reality. Remember how my parents closed a successful business?? Now I understood them 100%! And only one is to blame for all this myself! So Dima, shut up, because New Year 2022 is coming soon, and no one needs an empty table..
24.02.2022
5 am, I wake up from explosions outside the window, shock, horror, everything I need in my bag, in 30 minutes they will pick us up, in 2 hours we are outside the city, going to a village 350 km away. from home, I don’t know who these people are nearby, I don’t know where we’re going either, but it’s definitely safer there than at home; strange, after 2 days of lying in bed with “corona”, it went away instantly; we are there, there is hot soup and a bed, great..
In an instant, your whole life is re-evaluated, and there are a million different thoughts in your head, and one of them is “You can die now, but you never became a game developer… Dima. Can you hear me? You dreamed of making games, but time was running out on you! What was the meaning of your slave life in recent years… Perhaps this is the end, but your childhood dream remained a dream…".
As you can understand, without further ado and worries, I thanked 3D visualization for everything, hugged it goodbye and left it in my past life, there is a new path ahead, the path of an indie developer, which we will go through together with you! Subscribe, write comments, the next text will be devoted to my training in the craft of game development.
P. S. Thank you so much to everyone who read to the end, you are amazing! I enjoyed it, I hope you did too. I didn’t know that writing lyrics would take so long, but it’s fascinating.
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