Broken Glass
👋🏻
Production has kicked into gear on what I have been affectionately calling "Astro Bot and Breaking Gaming's Fourth Wall."1 I spent the last two mornings working on title ideas and thumbnail concepts as per the advice I talked about in letter 44. Let's get the titles out of the way, that's a much shorter story.
- We Need to Redefine the Fourth Wall
- How Devs Break the Fourth Wall to Talk to You
- Why Devs Break the Fourth Wall
- When Devs Break the Fourth Wall
- Why Fourth Wall Breaks are Unforgettable
- Fourth Wall Breaks are...Broken
- Why do Games Break the Fourth Wall?
I hope it's obvious that I am planning on talking about the Fourth Wall and its implementation in games. I've found wonderful research and have a big fat lists of examples I came up with to use. It excites me.
For the thumbnail, I had/have a very clear idea of a character breaking the glass of a screen. It's simple, direct, and has potential to be intriguing if paired with the right title. Given Astro Bot inspired this whole essay, I wanted to start with him and what I really needed was a transparent glass texture.
Yeah...it wasn't a great start. From the "transparent" images in Google Search to the obscene prices for licensing, I was out of luck from the jump. Then I saw on one of the stock sites that AI-generated options could be filtered out. Well, why don't I just make one that way then?
I went first to Gemini since I pay for Google's tier and was semi-surprised that it flopped hard. It grabbed things from ShutterStock and wouldn't generate an image for me. I asked how to use Google's Imagen and it gave me a fake URL to an image it never generated. Later, it made me a transparent texture—checkerboarding and all.
I pivoted to the free tier of chatGPT and was immediately impressed with the guidance. A much better experience; that is until I ran out of daily generations right when I was getting the sort of texture I wanted. When I asked for variants, it generated them on top of an AI-version of Astro Bot, after making four textures like requested. It's remarkable how literal you must be with these LLMs.
Anyway, this morning I got a couple of textures that seemed satisfactory to me and I melded them together in Pixelmator Pro, threw on some effect, and made solid drafts, I think!
So why go through all this instead of just grabbing something off Google? Peace of mind and some tiny semblance of control. I don't have to worry about violating some license agreement, even if I am never actually pursued. I got to kind of get a version I like; certainly more than the ones off Google Image Search. Am I breaking some sort of moral artist contract by using AI-generation for a broken glass texture? I don't think so.
There was no other feasible, timely option for me. I spent my time mostly waiting for tokens to flip back on so I could make more. If I wasn't interrupted by a limit, I would have had this done yesterday morning when I started. That's empowering, especially in this conceptual phase.
Now I can get to the writing in earnest.
Until next time...
-
"ABABGFW", just rolls right off the tongue ↩
This letter is one block from the newsletter Memory Card by Max Roberts. Thoughts? Send me an email at max@maxfrequency.net.
Max is the writer and producer behind Max Frequency. cultivate and curate curiosity—both for himself and for others—by delighting in the details and growing greatness from small beginnings.
He's written a rich history and dive on the making of Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II, celebrated the 15th anniversary of Super Smash Bros. Brawl with the voice behind its hype, and examined how Zelda "stole" Fortnite's best mechanic.
Memory Card is a real-ish time, raw, drip feed newsletter of his creative process for telling these stories. It’s how The Thing™ gets made.
It's all powered by Max Frequency and patrons.
Wanna see The Thing™? Check it out on YouTube. Read it on The Blog.