Sticking to it

Hey,
I hope everyone is doing fine!

This week, I started the production on my game, and I hope I’ll have something to show you pretty soon! For now, I’m implementing all the entities I need inside a test level—which doesn’t make for an impressive screenshot:

Blender as Hammer

Yesterday, I saw some interesting posts by passivestar about using Blender as a Valve’s Hammer level editor:

• Making holes in level geometry
• Knife intersect
• Copying material
• Stairs
• Shear operator - easy cornered hallways
• Lowres polyhaven
• Polyhaven + ucupaint

Here is the list of Blender addons they are using:

• omnistep
• quickmenu
• uvProject
• polyhaven
• ucupaint
• Copy Attributes Menu

The workflow looked really smooth—also because they look amazing at Blender—and I started to think that I should try that for my game.

Resisting the sirens of procrastination

But it’s a trap I frequently fall into: trying to radically change my workflow after production has started—even if I quite like my current tools. Especially for small games, it’s often better to pin new techniques for later.

It’s not only me, I’ve seen countless productions where the team wanted to upgrade to the new major engine version, not to solve a problem, but to integrate a new tool. It always leads to losing days fixing issues, while the new tool gets slowly abandoned because nothing is built to work with it in the current content pipeline.

Even early in production, I’ll force myself to stick to my workflow—I have a game to make!

Have a great week, see you next time!