I love the water in my game

I don't want to learn every menu under every other menu of a game engine. What I want is to bring the vision, say it clearly, and let the machine do the heavy lifting.

The hard part is the clearly. You cannot describe water you have never really looked at. That you need as your own knowledge. Something to say to the machine. A water from a low angle, water is a mirror, and the world stands in it upside down. From straight above it turns clear, and you see the bottom. That sounds obvious until you have to put it into words for machine that has never stood by a lake.

The first ripples the machine made were smooth and round and pretty, and they were wrong. They looked glued on. My game is built from flat, faceted shapes, and a world with one visual style forgives almost anything except a thing from another style. I let the machine build first and corrected it after. That order works for me: let it try, then point at what is off. At one point I was explaining how a wave works with a wall of sand.

Then came the real lesson of the day. Everything in a picture is related to its light. The ripples did not belong because they did not know where the sun was. So I stopped asking for changes and asked the machine to draw its plan first, a simple drawing of the sun, the water and the light between them. When the drawing was right, the ripples were right.

For me, that is most of the work with a machine: seeing the world properly, saying what I see, and checking the plan before anything gets built.

I came into that stream with a long list. Me and machine did only one thing of it. But children will play this game to learn their first Dutch words, and I want the water they wade through to be worth looking at. One thing, done well. Water in Dutch? It is water.

The video is cut from a two hour live stream where I built water for Save the Dutch, my free game for learning Dutch.