What equipment are you on right now...?

Note: I originally wrote this article several months ago and just rediscovered it in my drafts folder. If nothing else it gives me an opportunity to preview a few images from forthcoming chapters. 

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Original article as follows... 

I often/never get asked what it takes to be one of the world's foremost one-man game creators and all-round nice guy.

I'm happy to take off my mask and cape for a moment and give a little insight on what it takes to be this good.

1) Hardware

I started out creating games on a crappy PC with less power than the one it took to land on the moon. The processor got fried in the later stages of making part three of the Tara Trilogy. 

I realised I needed to upgrade.

Nowadays I have two reasonably powerful machines, a laptop and a NAS set up to handle endless image rendering, file back-ups and my addiction to adult websites.

There are a few things to consider when building up a suitable computer. Mostly determined by what type of rendering you choose.

I mostly use 3Delight with some custom scripts as my render engine. This uses the CPU which means I need machines with lots of multi core processing power.

I sometimes use the iRay render engine, but generally prefer the aesthetics of 3Delight.

iRay uses the graphics card for GPU rendering. It generally takes longer even with a high-end graphics card. That said the cards I use are pretty powerful. 

Along with water cooling and lots of shiny LED lighting, my rigs look good and work pretty well! 

More recently I’ve really been going down the rabbit hole of custom modding and upgrades. The less said about that the better though…

2) Software

The next thing you need is software and the skills to use them. Daz3D is great and it's free! That is until you have to buy licenses and assets. (More on that later) 

3D rendering was new to me when I started out making games back in 2014. It’s been a steep learning curve and it really shows when comparing my earlier work to what I’m producing nowadays.

I'm also a Photoshop Jedi, dream in HTML code and eat JavaScript for breakfast.

I have a background in film production and photography which helps with overall aesthetics and developing narratives.

Being massively over-qualified academically can also be useful.

3) Assets

You are going to need assets, lots of assets. Although naturally well endowed, I also have to buy everything that's used in my games. 

Assets like skin textures, body morphs and poses are all available from various sources online. You can also buy outfits, environments, props, rendering and lighting pre-sets. 

All these things have been created by talented people who all deserve to be paid for what they do.

I could write a whole article about how piracy is killing the digital industries one illegal file-share or download at a time. 

I have never, and would never, use assets I haven't paid for. 

Standing up for the ownership of my creative work doesn’t usually go down well either in a culture that has normalized piracy and disregards copyright. 

Doing so has been interpreted as me having a ‘meltdown’ and the aspiration to turn many years of creative practice into a viable business as being ‘greedy’ and ‘scummy’. 

As much as I enjoy making this series, just like everyone involved in the creative industries, I can’t do it for nothing. 

I guess I’m preaching to the converted here on Patreon though.

4) Skills

I guess one of the other key ingredients is a combination of creativity, imagination and organisational skills. 

My stories are fictional, although there are some elements of my own experiences that I have used for inspiration. For example, I'll never forget what happened with a girl called Annie in a corridor at college...

But I digress. 

Creating a multi-faceted story like the Academy is great.
Keeping track of it is a massive head****. 

Despite pages and pages of detailed production notes it's sometimes difficult to remember how it all pieces together. I work in a very fluid way, allowing ideas to develop and expand as they are created.

This may explain why what I envisaged as a one year, 4000 image game production project has mutated into a six or seven year behemoth. 

The last time I checked the Academy production folder had over 165,000 files. I'm sure this will reach 200,000 before it kills me or another hard-drive.

5) Time, money and passion

Finally, and this is probably the most important... I'd hate to add up all the money I've spent on hardware, software, assets, strippers and coke over the years. 

More than that, I've lost count of the thousands of hours spent diligently crafting animated sequences and making boobs bounce in a very satisfying way. 

Working into the small hours each night is normal for me. Working through the weekend is normal. Watching adult videos for research purposes is also strangely normal…

I guess I’m pretty passionate about this project. I’m also a perfectionist and I’m never fully satisfied with my own work. 

The laser beam of critical self-awareness can be a blessing and a curse. This will go some way to explaining my motivation to go through an exhaustive remake process. 

But it’ll all be worth something in the end right?

dsp3000