From Linear Creativity to the Multidimensional Cosmos of Game Development
Text: Maxim Zhestkov
Concept art: Cosmos Interactive
Introduction
For the past two decades, I’ve been immersed in the world of art films and short film directing, where I was the author of all aspects of production. I was always passionate about diving into fantasies and creating something that begins in imagination, transitions to sketches and culminates in spatial constructs. As my work has always been an odd mix of architecture, sculpture, music and animation, I did it for myself to learn something and find new ways of expression. I applied this approach of searching through making to new software tools as well.
This way of trial and error can lead to deep insights — but it can also become a long way to a place where other people have been before and told about it.
Four years ago, my journey into game development began, and it has been an intoxicating experience filled with complexities and challenges. This has been a journey filled with many twists and turns, and I would love to share them with — both to tell about something I already learned and to understand something deeper by explaining it, as great Richard Feynman taught.
This article is the first in a series, and it is an overview of my path from linear processes of film production to a multidimensional tesseract of game development.
Linear Creativity vs. Multidimensional Systems
In my previous work with art films and installations, the creative process was largely sequential. You start with an idea, move to sketches and studies, translate it into 3D language, work on lighting and animation, and finally engage in editing and finalization. The process was pretty predictable, and even having collaborators, it felt “flat” and directional, like moving along a conveyor belt.
As an example — in my film Elements, I started with sketches, created 3D architectural spaces, experimented with particle simulations, then moved to camera work, material settings, and lighting — one stage at a time, each taking days. There is a lot of space for experimentation in this process, like in working with unpredictability of simulations and looking for wonder of system dynamics in them. Still, the entire process of a film creation is a chain of stages that come one after another.
This linear progression is in stark contrast to the real-time engines of game development, where you can always change everything, creating a dance between stages in the very process of creation. Everything becomes an interconnected system, highly mobile and rapidly changing.
All processes happen simultaneously. You might work on animation, and its character begins to suggest the dynamics of a scene. Parallel work with artists on lighting creates additional relationships with texture and character dynamics.
Complexity of Game Development
When I first ventured into game development, I naively thought I could approach it as I did my previous projects — going by intuition, creating frames, ideas, and thoughts, and then putting it all together with a team. However, I quickly hit a wall. The realization that my familiar patterns of creation, which I had used for decades, had little in common with this new world was incredibly painful.
But it was precisely this new world that I wanted to be a part of. I love encountering complexity and finding ways to solve it. One of the answers turned out to be logic and clear documentation. Moving away from pure intuition in the process, creating a moment for intuition and flight of thought, and then putting everything on the rails of production.
We have a joke that there are two states — Cosmos & Chaos — and we constantly try to bring all processes to the state of Cosmos — a perfect structure, complete order.
We have people working on the tech part, dealing with huge arrays of particles and elements, while in parallel we work on the script and lore of the story. Information from these separate flasks penetrates each other — elements from technological experiments find their way into the lore and plot, while work on technologies acquires parts of the logic and settings that are prescribed with the writer. This is why keeping all the information accessible is crucial, and we do work every day on perfecting our processes.
It is also important to have a team who challenge each idea and test its strength against the overall concept. The elegance of the whole should not be disrupted by individual details and small thoughts that come during the process.
Lessons and Conclusions
The complexity I’ve encountered in game development is unlike anything I’ve experienced before, but it’s precisely this complexity that brings something unimaginable in other mediums. It feels like I’ve found my boss-level challenge and am in a dance of learning and developing new mental tools and modes.
For creative people planning to transition from linear projects to game development, I would emphasise the importance of challenging yourself and confronting new and big challenges. For me, it’s like moving from 2D to 3D — the dynamics in which we entrust a person perceiving and acting within the system gives completely new horizons, making the process and result something akin to experimental psychology of perception.
I see games as a new and crucial form of expression and an amalgamation of all the disciplines that interest me. In a sense, it’s the final point of fusion of different aspects of art. All my life, I’ve been looking for tools for fantasies, and with each passing day, I’m more convinced that the final canvas and tools have been found.
Conclusion
Game development, to me, represents not just a new medium, but the ultimate cosmos of communication possibilities. We’re at the very beginning of this journey, with countless planets, systems, and galaxies yet to be discovered in this cosmos of interactive development. Games are not just games; they are the final frontier of communication possibilities.
As we move forward in this series of articles, we’ll continue to explore the intricate dance of technology, art, and human perception that makes game development such a fascinating field. In our next article, we’ll dive deeper into the specific challenges of managing multidisciplinary teams in game development projects. The journey from linear creativity to the multidimensional cosmos of game development is challenging, but infinitely rewarding. It’s a testament to the ever-evolving nature of art and technology, and a glimpse into the future of human creativity and expression.
