Because we have been constantly punished for, and taught that the symptoms of #ADHD are just us being garbage people, it is important to change your internal narrative.
I mean, I AM a garbage person, but that is in addition to my ADHD symptoms. :)
There is just a tonne of things I now know I should NOT feel guilty for, because I am not playing with the gear the neurotypicals are.
No, what I should feel guilty for is now that I know I have ADHD, I have to be responsible for working with it.
Example: I cannot perceive time like a neurotypical. My frontal cortex doesn't do that shit. Awesome. I know this, and will no longer feel guilty or let people make me feel bad for this.
But...
I am responsible for setting alarms, timers, reminders, calendars and prompts.
Example: I am prone to emotional dysregulation and rejection sensitivity dysphoria.
I am not going to feel guilty about that anymore, or let people bully me about it.
However...
I AM responsible for monitoring my moods, medication and learning emotional strategies.
I am not going to let people treat me like shit because they do not understand my neurodivergence, and that starts with ME.
I will NOT allow myself to repeat back the negative messages I have been fed by people who did not understand ADHD.
I WILL educate myself about it.
I have ADHD.
I am not a garbage person because I have ADHD.
I am a garbage person because I dunk my fries into my thickshake, watch zip popping videos and am immediately and deeply attracted to the evil bisexual character in any given show.
And maybe because at an "all you can eat" restaurant I just fill my plates up with fist loads of shrimp and ignore all the cheap filling stuff like pasta and rice that they think you are gonna balance out the meal with.
Fists. Of. Shrimp.
And I think pineapple and anchovies belong on pizza.
At the same time.
Great. Now I am hungry.
Support this fucking dirty, incorrigible, antiauthoritarian fuckslut of a human dumpster fire here. *sips tea*
A video game that simulates #ADHD. The mission objective changes at random every few minutes and whenever you walk into a new room, your inventory shuffles one item and sometimes it becomes invisible for a few minutes.
You auto steer into table corners.
Whenever you get more than one sidequest there is a chance you go into overwhelm and your controller will pretend it is unplugged.
The corners of the level starts filling up with laundry.
You put down an item and it vanishes when you look away.
You have timed missions but during loading screens that can dramatically shorten by an hour or five.
In Life Is Strange Before The Storm, one truth Rachel Amber tells Chloe during "two truths and a lie" that she is a Leo.
The brilliant thing is later if you pay attention, her birthday is the day after Leo ends. But her starchart has her on a cusp.
This is brilliant.
The series has a few moments of absolutely brilliant subtle clues in it that add layers of meaning, but you have to be sharp to spot them.
But if you miss those, there are still blatant clues around the place that give some level of depth.
The main mysteries of the game aren't hard at all, probably to a fault, but on replay there are far more little ones.
A technique I highly recommend to #gamedev artists is to look at actual shipped game assets.
There are various ways to get hold of them, such as programs like Ninja Ripper, Utiny ripper or via archives.
And I must stress this is for learning purposes ONLY. NEVER use them.
Being able to look at models from a wide range of titles, see how they are rigged, how their Uvs are layed out, the triangle count and modularity... it all helps you understand the ACTUAL end result you are aiming for.
I think it is really important that students bridge the gap between where they are at, and what the end products are at.
You may think "oh, the models in X game are super high end, high tech stuff" but when you actually crack it open and examine it in your DCC...
There is no future for humanity in a world where all human endeavour is stolen and boiled down to something that replaces humans.
What do humans do in a world where humans are not employed to create?
Is that a world you want to live in?
If you take away the creative process of human artists into pool, the zeitgeist becomes entirely manufactured from an ever decreasing pool of looping cannibalism.
Pop literally eating itself.
Endless product without exploration. Product feeding on product.
No art movements, no re-evaluations of our place and relationship to the world.
Draw calls are responsible for a good 50 percent of the chugging issues I have helped games with.
A draw call is "okay now draw me an apple, and come back when you are done for the next instruction."
Then you ask for another apple. Then when they return you ask for another...
So the GPU is running back and forth to the CPU when it could just do that once and "draw me a pile of apples".
Rendering an apple, in this example, takes a tiny amount of what a core on the GPU can render. So by welding all the apples into one bigger mesh, it can be done faster in one draw call than all the fucking around to draw them one by one.