A look back at what happened this year. A public storage of my memories and wishes for the future.

Previously: Pt. 2 :: The Foe, the Furry and the Maniac

Between 2020 and last summer I was teaching a double course in Fundamentals of Animation and Animation Techniques for game design students at a private university in Germany. We only had 3 hours a week for one semester and a very ambitious curricula… that I mostly ignored. To whoever thought it was a good idea to include sound design to the learning objectives: sorry, it never happened.

Instead, I went through the 12 principles, focusing on their limitations when it comes to game animation, the workarounds, and ultimately I tried to drill in the students’ brains four basic things:

1. Always animate for something. What are you trying to communicate with the movement? A powerful slash? A clumsy roll? A tsundere-like wrath reaction?
2. Naming conventions & folder structures. You work with a team, and even when working alone, you won’t remember where you put the assets and how you called them if there is no proper structure.
3. Just because it’s artistic, it doesn’t mean it’s not technical. Apply scales, check bone axes… and put your pivot points where I can see them! What are the animation styles that you want to base your aesthetics on? How will that affect your workflow?
4. DON’T CRUNCH. All exercises were done in class, and students had the chance to work on their own final project during those hours. One thing is to lose yourself a bit into your passion projects or a small game jam, another is to normalize that you have to overdo things and push yourself stealing hours of valuable sleep and rest in order to have a chance. LIES. The only thing that it surely achieves is developing chronic pains.

Anyhow, I carried these teachings with me wherever I could. This year I showed growth and prepared a one-hour talk for giving it multiple times called So you’re good at drawing, now what? The technical skills of a game artist. I gave that lecture a total amount of two times: once in English for the Game Innovation Lab at Uni Bayreuth and once in Spanish for Multimedia Production Engineering students at the Universidad La Salle Noroeste. Still waiting for my alma mater to ask if I would like to present it in Catalan.

Besides that, a few weeks before my master thesis deadline, I was asked to do one of the A MAZE. Berlin Hyper Talks on whatever I wanted. Well, this is how I started to speak publicly about 13 Rosas. I had 5 minutes and spent 2 and a half explaining the recent history of Spain (~100 years). I think I’ve never spoken faster on a stage.

Some months past, masters was done, and I decided to prepare another presentation focusing on the joys and pains of working in this industry. The bliss and curse of turning your passion into your source of income is probably the best talk I’ve ever given because it contains half an hour of me insisting that yes, our work is beautiful, AND yes, we deserve to take care of our body and mind.

I’m going to give this talk and iterations of it at as many places as I can. Only time will say in which way it will affect my career. If you see it, you’ll understand why.

Next: Pt. 4 :: Half a year without an income. Take care.