Every role-playing game fan knows that you can’t spec a character to fill every role. Life follows similar rules. In my younger days I was the DPS heavy “rouge/barbarian”; a major dual wielding damage dealer — I pumped out high quality art assets at tremendous speed.
As my career progressed, I had to re-spec my role to be more of a “tank” — A lead artist that still had to produce, but had the added role of managing and protecting the team.
As I leveled up even farther I found I had to refocus my stats towards the buff granting “bard” — Directing the process and still supporting a team but now with diplomacy and planning, making sure others were empowered to do their jobs for the betterment of the whole.
It seemed my damage dealing days were over… along the way I had traded strength for wisdom.
The other parallel I’ve found is that certain roles are less sexy than others. If you spec’ed your character wrong it can be hard to find a party to group with, especially when you start hanging with the hardcore “min-maxers” — I found that some of the career choices I made as my career progressed made it difficult to get the attention of younger hot-shot developers. This was compounded by the missing “epic armor set” or eye candy on display in my portfolio. I was still sporting the coolest battleaxe from the first expansion, but now version five was out with upgraded “next-gen” graphics and my once kick-ass battleaxe was looking pixelated and blurry.
Well life unlike games has a way of giving us unusual and unique opportunities to redefine ourselves. I’ve had the chance to dig in and flex some long dormant art muscles. and I’ve found that I may be stronger than I ever was. The reckless speed and blind passion of youth has been replaced by the confident strokes of a skilled craftsman.
To put the icing on this long-winded analogy, my character roster is now a collection of all those old roles. My damage dealing warrior may be soft around the middle, but there is still power in my swing, and it’s guided by hard earned wisdom.
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One of my recent tasks was to build assets for the evangelist team at Unity — They wanted some “good looking” modular building blocks that could be used for demos. Something other than cubes and spheres and programmer art. They requested a style reminiscent of the side-scroller ’Rochard‘, but with a more “current-gen” feel.
This is what I came up with…
First I created a high-res platform to get the style nailed down and signed off.
Next I switched to the low-res geometry to build out and test the functionality of the connector bits.
