The machine was wrong and I kept it anyway

I spent a day making birch trees for my game. The best thing that happened all day was a mistake.

I asked the AI to put black bark marks on a white trunk. What came back was flat black rectangles, floating a hair above the wood, not wrapped around the trunk at all. Wrong. Bark does not do that. A trunk is round, the marks go around it, everybody knows this.

My first thought was annoyed. Come on AI. You can do better than that.

Then two seconds passed, and I looked at it again, and I thought: wait. That is lovely. Do not fix that.

I keep coming back to this. The accident is not the achievement. Accidents are cheap and they arrive all day long, dozens of them, and most of them are garbage that you throw straight out without thinking. The achievement is spotting the one that is not garbage.

A good designer has an ability to recognise a good thing when it turns up in front of you by completely the wrong road, especially when it argues with what you thought you wanted.

I could have fixed it that AI made mistake. And the instinct to fix it is not a stupid instinct. It is the instinct of somebody who knows what bark looks like. It is also, in this exact case, the instinct that would have destroyed the best thing on the whole model.

Four vertices. That is what the identity of a birch comes down to in my game now. Four. The less there is the better it is for the game. We have made a masterpiece!

How exactly this happened? Well! I give you that. 

There is a much longer version of this. Vincent van Gogh is in it. So is a real white duck, and the five colours of a birch, and the reason I will not put a single individual leaf in this game.

Read it on Substack, or watch me talk through the whole thing for 39 minutes with no teleprompter.

Save the Dutch, a game where you save Dutch the duck by learning Dutch. Devlog 1, if you missed it: the announcement.