Part 2 concluded with a sense of despair and futility. I would want to think this is a case, but a discussion with my fiancée made me realise that maybe I've missed something, and there is another side to the same coin. Some people doubt, but there is also a group of people who are full of confidence. They finish some training and behave as if they are experts in the topic. They are confident in their opinion, they promoting themselfs as experts and people believe and trust them thanks to this confidence. Sadly, this confidence is not always accompanied by knowledge or experience.
Anyway, I'm not one of them and can only speak for myself. These days, I understand that doubt is just a part of life.
At the beginning, I did not care too much about stuff and was only playing with making games. Then came the time when the industry matured, and some people using middleware after a month of development could show "game engines" which could render nice visuals, have physics animations, and particle systems. I was then still struggling with shaders, animations, and did not even think about physics. How could they achieve so much better in shorter times?
Then came the time when people stopped making custom engines and switched to Unreal and Unity, which in some way became the standard of the industry. Bigger companies wanted to save costs on production, and indies wanted to make games, not technology. Somewhere around that time, making engines stopped being cool, and devs moved on. They could have a playable demo in a day when, for me, even the most basic things took forever. Should I still be doing my own tech?
Now we have times when AI is everywhere. People Vibe Coding, where I am still polishing my skills and trying understand how things work. Should I switch to doing stuff using AI?
In the end, does answering any of these questions really matter? I like to understand things in depth. I like doing my own tech. I like to crate game in my own way. I will also use AI, but not as an omnipotent solution, but as a tool to achieve my goals. It is just annoter supporiting tool like Stack Overflow. Anyway, in a lot of cases, it does not even give me the answers that we need.
Do I despise middleware? I would be hypocritical if I said yes. I'm using them in my own project. Do I despise Unity and Unreal? Not really, they are just another tool to achieve our goals. I worked for Unity Technologies and met a lot of talented people who were or still are creating it. Is AI something bad? Not really, if it works for you, use it, but in the end, this is not a tool for everything. Use it where it makes sense, and in other cases, just do not use it.
The older I get, the fewer doubts I have about my approach to life. I just like to be flexible. When I'm working for a company, I try to do things their way. What I do need to fit the product we develop, it should also follow the workflows that are in the given company. If I use Unity, I try to approach development in a way that fits it. When I develop Unreal, I try to make stuff in the Unreal way. Finally, when I do stuff for myself, I want to do it in my own way. Want to experiment with stuff, explore possibilities. Some of them may be wrong, some of them may be stupid, but this is what defines White Rabbit Engine and differentiates it from others. This is for me a trip to the wonderland where everything is possible to achieve if I only want to invest my time and energy into it.
And what I want to invest my free time in is finishing the Tribute and making other games. Is this a return to Wonderland? Not really, as I do not think that I ever left it. I was there all the time, just a little bit preoccupied with the real world. But now I'm slowly recovering from it and the forest of the T-posed Twinsens.
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