Hey Everyone and welcome to the November in Review, this is Gaian with all the sick deets of the past month! Today is my birthday! Before I get at the nitty gritty of the month I thought that, at a time where we reflect on the year, I’d reflect a small bit on my career.
A 22 Year Long Career – Baby Gaian
I began doing creative work and programming at 11, where I attended the University of Alberta Discover-E Computing Sciences summer camp. We made one long webpage on geocities with flash animations, and images embedded in it.
I was forever changed by that experience,as it enabled me to build things with programming, animation, and creativity. I have never stopped since.
Later on, with the help from my Dad, I had a website with an actual theme. A CSS styled banner, side bar, and page body. All hosted on a webhost, with a domain, and handled by me through an FTP connection to the website! I ended up repurposing that base 3 times, with the 3rd draft of that website now on the Some People’s Kids Interactive website‘s “Innanet”.
For a lot of my youth I did a bunch of amateur kid drawings and flash animations, nothing particularly noteworthy, or good… We all know that stage in someone’s skill in a field where it’s absolutely crayon drawings.
I tried making webcomics, as I was deeply inspired by the art and humour of VG-Cats. Though it turns out sequential art, and comedy writing are very difficult. While I felt I had some good gags, actually presenting them visually and through dialogue turned out to be incredibly hard. Quite frustrating when you’d show it off and people didn’t understand the joke.
Later I made a fun little comic that I actually still enjoy: Minotoast. 4 little strips about a Minotaur-toast protecting a labyrinth but every comic strip he does nothing while the happenings of the labyrinth do all the work. It’s also on the Some People’s Kids Innanet.
Now Growing Up
Finally I turned 18, which is the age you can legally own a company. I incorporated Genome Studios on October 10th, 2010. It was mostly to preserve the name, and draw a line in the sand about the ethos underlying the creative studio: To be at the core fabric of creative artwork and entertainment, it’s Genome.
With passion and a studio behind me I continued onward towards actually starting the studio and it’s body of work. I tried to start an indie project with a friend: “Project Silence”. The pursuit lasted 8 months and ended up in complete failure. It cost me $10k CAD that took me years to repay. A ten-thousand dollar lesson in what it truly takes to make a company and build a videogame. Turns out passion isn’t the only thing you need to accomplish that.
After some time I ended up with the resolve to attend a College. First for Videogame Design, then for Illustration and Sequential art. The wombo-combo of being a solo developer. Program the game, and do the artwork for the game. With the added value of having a much clearer understanding of comics, graphic design principals, and storyboarding.
During that time I created 2 game projects to completion. Super Pierre Bros 3, a stupid little platformer with fully voiced cutscenes. And my capstone project: Seed, a 2D, open world, action tower defense that had dialogue, combat, tower defense mechanics, and a streaming system that would load 5000×5000 pixel chunks of level as you transition between blocks.
Into an Early Career
After College I kinda ran dry for a while. But eventually started the cartoon series Get Rich, now rebranded to Some People’s Kids. It was a series of work that included 3 1/2 comic episodes, animations, and an interactive website. I worked on the series over 5 years.
During that time I burnt out every year at least. Had to take quarterly hiatuses. Turns out doing pure illustration was exhausting to me and really made it difficult to press on. I managed an advertising campaign throughout, did database programming for the website, created an interactive website workflow that allowed me to make JavaScript games, and a dynamic scheduled interactive website.
Alongside that I created a digital version of paper prototype I had done in school to extremely positive reception: Gladiators. A 4 player free for all gladiator arena, with a Map Editor.
I also animated a bunch of projects, completed one, created an animatic pilot of another. And burnt out on 2-3 animations I was never able to release despite one being pretty damn close to the finish line.
I finally broke off of the Series and tried at something else. I was inspired to return to videogames and actually get at the meat of making them. No more compromising to do 2D because I was intimidated in 3D programming and art, and no more compromising on the genre of work, I just want to make the games I want to be able to make. So I started Awakened Guardian in 2018, a Survival Souls-like that started as tutorial studies and broke out into my now regular career of 3D Action Gameplay Programming. It was a spiritual successor to Silence, the project that cost me $10k years ago, but now wholly evolved.
I worked and worked and worked on that project. It was a huge goal, and required extensive studying and research into countless systems and mechanics. Even to this day I am utterly astonished how much work I actually put into the project at that stage of it’s creation.
I eventually stopped in 2021, pretty burnt out and feeling I was never going to be able to create the work I wanted to. The demos I had put out were shoddy and barely operable, mechanics were so complicated and I struggled to get things to be stable or playable.
I did however capture this one playthrough that actually depicted the emergent experience of playing your own journey through the game. Ending in a perfect character death fueled by my own mistakes, that played towards a personal story about the game that I still tell people to this day. It was a true proof that the adventure could be yours, and something you’d wanna share with others as a personal experience.
But still, it was not enough to keep me inspired and dedicated to what I was doing at the time.
Get Professional, Kid.
With the advice of a mentor I got a professional job. It was an incredible learning experience, showing me the ins and outs of production, working with colleagues, working for clients, and pushing your work further than you were comfortable with to truly present a “Completed Game”. Not just a scattered half-realized array of mechanics. It was a strenuous experience but has changed how I work to this day.
Of note, I contributed to the creation of a creative sandbox VR title: Rube Goldberg Workshop. I will never forget the perspective and support given by our Producer to press for quality and true realization of the project despite my running dry over and over throughout the project. I always work to that standard now.
During a low in my health leading to a month off from work I ended up in a creative flow that I still don’t know how I got. I made a small indie horror from start to finish in that month: Del Lago Layover, based on a dream. It became a series that I fell in love with and now hold as an IP I would like to continue to delve into over time.
Building off of the “Paper Puppet” workflow that I created for the project, I started Some People’s World. Through it I evolved the tech used in AG and Del Lago. Building out a far more versatile toolset out of my lifetime of 3D programming. It was mostly just a project to do studies and improvements to the tech that, up until then, was quite… rough…
Eventually I left work. The stress and pressure of full blown game production is enormous, and my health was taking a very bad turn for the worse due to that. Thankfully I left under totally amicable circumstances and I still love everyone I got the opportunity to work with.
Modern Gaian, Modern Genome Studios.
Then at the turn of this year, 2024, I tried to start the indie studio business again. Now with professional experience, 3 years of skill development, far deeper understanding and control over my own library of programming, and the enthusiasm to return to strengthening Genome Studios and my own projects.
Over 8 months I burnt out. I had massive ambitions, a full docket of work, scheduled ongoing and work with no ceiling to it’s completion. I was developing work and Tutorials on the open source game engine: Open 3D Engine. I tried to restart Awakened Guardian with a more stable platform of tech built from my later projects that were far better programmed. I tried to get funding and investment through the Canada Media Fund, an insanely competitive federal funding organization. And gather colleagues to work on projects with that possible chance at gathering funding.
This burnout hurt me so badly. Though, despite it carving so deep, I actually sprung back pretty quickly. Only out for a month. However, this was under vastly changed terms. I would not seek investment until my project is gripping without any exposition, explanation, or justification. I would not keep doing public outreach and promotion. I was just going to work on projects because it’s always been something I love and can’t help but being inspired to do. My conclusion was that I wanted to be able to be a failure and still okay. Business success costs a lot, and it requires things to be satisfied far outside the extents of creative expression, and learning and emboldening the projects themselves.
Suddenly with this “it’s okay to fail”, along with some advice about it being better to make a “piece of shit” and fix it later, than to not be able to make a well programmed, optimized, game at all, I decided to pull up a past version of Awakened Guardian and just resume with the absolute mess I had had at the time. All of a sudden I’m making significant strides towards building the game as it was originally intended. I’m uncovering this MASSIVE legacy of work that I totally forgot existed. My intuition and skills simply make repairing and stabilizing the work incredibly clear and achievable. Out of nowhere I am working out this epic game, filled with new tech, frankenstined together with bits an pieces of those future projects, and utilizing my skills to their maximum. An incredible development that came from re-valuating priorities, and humbling myself.
And this is the career that brought me to this very day, to write this Month in Review. In some form or another I’ve been trying to do creative media production for the past 22 years. It’s been a lifetime of pursuit that I will never stop doing, if I can help it. I’m deeply grateful for the opportunities I’ve had, the people I’ve learned from, and worked with, and my ceaseless passion towards trying to make truly impactful work.
Now for the November in Review.
November 2024 – So much AI. Like. So much AI.
So speaking of AI, I started this month doing level development that has nothing to do with AI development!
I started to prototype a subregion in my recently created new region, the Golden Valley. It’s a collapsing bridge that spans to a key area isolated by rivers. The goal of this place was to create the first area where gathering surplus resources actually begins to mean something, as traversing the bridge takes some platforming, some spatial problem solving, and resources to rebuild your way to progressing through. An area where you need to spend more resources than you can carry at any given time. It’s something I have never been able to capture in previous versions of the game.
As I worked at creating this space I came to a pretty stark realization, which was that: nothing I do outside of creating this AI will matter if I simply cannot reach a level of competence out of the AIs. A world with no participants is empty and meaningless.
So I returned to the AI grindstone… to work on AI.
I started tackling the AIs goal prioritizations, the mechanisms which drive the AI to change it’s base plans based on its current state of awareness.
I then began trying to create the various actions to start actually fulfilling the goals.
I began prototyping what I call a “Shared Subregion”, it’s an intermediary between global knowledge and an AI’s singular local knowledge. In modern open world games, outposts will often have a means to divvy up actions and tasks. This creates a deeper sense of intelligence out of the AI’s as they won’t just lump together doing the exact same behaviour, stupidly behaving with narrow ability to respond to base info.
For now I have the AI able to request a task, and the Shared Region grants it. It’s just Patrol Routes and Lookout points, but this prooves out the relationship of the AI with the region or outpost.
Many of these tasks were done in the same day. If I’m not making meaningful strides in a day I don’t feel I’ve done the right things to progress. Thankfully more times than not I’ve been able to make those meaningful strides.
Next I ended up poring over my gameplay systems to fill the AI’s knowledge with awareness. Creating lists of targets it detects, knowledge over what items it has in it’s inventory, and what it has equipped. It was immensely tedious, but a very necessary stride in creating a deep awareness of it’s own circumstances.
I built out the means for the AI to properly input the right inputs to use any weapons changing input schemes. Some weapons have light and heavy attacks, aiming, shooting, casting spells. Light attack and spell cast… It can be quite variable at times. Now an AI can aim and shoot, or find out what the spellcast button is. Makes everything far easier to control in the actual behaviour as we can simply just say “cast spell” and it handles it however way it needs to.
I then made some limiter switches to isolate chunks of the AI’s decision making to enable customizing across different AI’s.
Great another day done. But finally the buck dropped. Some of my early work began collapsing all around me.
“You can’t stop there, you need to make AI or your world will be empty!” Exactly. So… I worked on more AI.
This ended up driving me for 3 days to rework, restructure, and bring together a far more stable interpretation of the behaviour systems I had already created. These were definitely days that didn’t end with closure and completion, but facing it head on, I managed to bring things around.
As part of the overhaul I managed to expand the combat to include heavy attacks, random length combo chains that dynamically limit themselves to the max combo the given weapon is able to provide. I got enemies to lockon, flank move, and break up their follow actions to allow them to recalculate to better actions than follow.
I did hurt myself pretty badly in this stint though. Had a problem solving session that lasted till 3AM and ended the day in an aggravated, strung out, completely foggy state. I paid for it for days afterwards.
But finally I was able to do… More AI.
I broke through on some remaining issues, got my AI’s to give up on goals that are fruitless so they could break out into more basic goals. This is to allow me to only calculate valuable information valid to any given goal. If the AI system rolls over to a different goal without the AI Manager matching, things get weeird.
I restored the AI’s ability to prepare itself by gathering items weapons and resources as their AI designates as needed to prepare. Some lingering Combat issues got cleared out, and now I was back to having all the features I’d originally created out, along with deeper combat, working preparation, and working give ups. The things that were collapsing on me the week prior.
And now, I was able to do AI work.
Jokes aside, this final stage of progress has been an incredible realization of systems and features I’d never done in my entire career of programming, and entertainment media.
With all my AI restoration complete, I was finally breaching into the more dynamic things we, as the audience/players, expect from professional grade gameplay AI. I was making my AI prototype arm themselves in the heat of battle without totally betraying the true urgency of fighting their enemy. I was making my AI able to change equips in order to access the combative ability of many different weapons in its arsenal. The very weapons it’s preparation goal was able to arm itself with. And also, not to be ignorant and equip a weapon it doesn’t have the ammo for, and try to use it, resulting in obvious failure.
The AI could now attack me unarmed as combat was pressing, equip a melee weapon to better meet me in combat, and switch to a ranged weapon, in this case a Kunai, toss it at me, and re-equip its sword now that it was unarmed from throwing it’s kunai.
After a month of continuous AI development, building basic actions, creating a massive awareness system throughout long standing gameplay systems, building priority and awareness into its decision making, building out systems to support more complex actions, and stabilizing it all, I had an instance of an AI that actually feels intelligent.
“Perceived Intelligence” in an AI is the absolute necessity of advanced videogames. If the player doesn’t have their suspension of disbelief span into believing there is an actual mind behind an AI, then the AI and world will feel empty and flat. Actually having an opponent, staving off some beast, protecting a villager fleeing for their life… all these things rely on creating a connection between the player and the world these characters are taking part in.
While on its first legs, the AI I’ve managed to get to has finally proven out a basis of this level of connection. It means that rather than proving it can be done at all, I am now able to start building from it knowing I’ll be creating greater depth TO that sense of intelligence.
This breaks through a major wall that has plagued Awakened Guardian for years. The AI system can now begin supporting an actual gameplay experience. The benchmarking and tests I’ve done on level scale and generation are now something valid as I’ll actually be able to populate that large, generated, world with inhabitants.
Along with the immense work at stabilizing and expanding the gameplay systems I’ve been doing since I returned to AG in August, I have never hit such a deep stage of experience and skill in my life. I’m breaching into a space where I am making true games, rather than a random assortment of half-baked mechanics.
While content creation is still a constant pressure that all studios face, and what most budgets end up being needed for. I’m creating a prototype that can be scaled into production. The mechanics and experiences I’m getting to are ones that actually show a functioning game, with compelling experiences and dynamics to it. I might actually be getting towards something worth playing!
In Conclusion
So with that all said. Thanks to my long time fans, to those eager to support me within the industry and out, to my mentors and colleagues that gave me opportunities I never thought I’d be able to get, and to any of you checking out this blog or others. I am deeply proud and grateful that I am still learning, still growing, and becoming better and better able to create the deeply compelling work that Genome Studios was always founded to create.
December will likely be a pretty slow month, but I am eagerly working towards a new build to play with all the immense progress I’ve put together so far. I can’t wait to bring the Guardian, their world, the complex and dynamic life going on within that world, and epic adventure, forth and get some real play going. For my sake, and yours.
Here’s to another Month, another year, and continued growth throughout it all.
Thanks for reading.
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