The cheapest bark was the best bark

Save the Dutch, a game where you save Dutch the duck by learning Dutch.

A birch is not really a shape. It is a skin.

Take the white away, take the black scars away, and what is left is a pale pole with some leaves on top. It could be any tree at all. So when we built the birches for Save the Dutch, the marks on the trunk mattered more than the geometry underneath them.

The correct way to put a black scar on a round white trunk is to wrap it. You curve the mark around the cylinder, the way the real tree does it. That is the right answer. It is also expensive, and at low poly a wrapped mark just smears into grey mush. You pay more and you get less.

So we did not do that. Every scar in this game is a flat plate. Four corners. Lying on the trunk surface, hovering a hair above it, stubbornly refusing to curve. One quadrilateral each. It is about the least geometry a visible thing can have.

And it looks better. Not cheaper-but-acceptable. Better. The hard black edge against white is exactly what the eye uses to say birch, and the wrapped version, modelled correctly, would have been softer and muddier and less like a birch than the wrong one.

Here is the honest part. Nobody planned this. The AI built it that way, and it built it wrong, and for a second or two my reaction was: come on, machine, you can do better than that. Then I looked again. Wait. Keep it. Do not fix it.

That second look is what puts good designer apart from normal designer. Good designer must have vision, plan and flexibility to adapt, to be aware of. If you are not aware you will miss small mistakes that turn to be a masterpieces. You can read more about this process in Substack and Patreon.  

The long version of this is on Substack. It has Vincent van Gogh in it, and a white duck, and the reason five colours are enough to build a birch, and why there will never be a single individual leaf in this game.

Read the whole thing, or watch the 39 minute version.

Save the Dutch is in development. Season 1 first. No dates, no promises, just the work, as it happens.