Dear Followers,

Today is officially my second day at work and I would therefore like to wish you all a healthy, successful and happy year 2024. I wish you many creative thoughts and projects.

I would also like to thank my dear Patreons, for their support and loyalty. Their constant support means a lot to me and it motivates me to stay on track with my vision:

I want to give indies an opportunity to learn and develop creatively.
I want artists to be able to make a living from their creativity, no matter where they live and without having to sell themselves, their lives and their families into the big machine of the 3D, VFX and games industry.

I would therefore like to present to you a plan for the first half of 2024.

In addition to further publications about Blender, free tutorials and technical articles, I would also like to spend more time with you as a community. I hope that the pixeltrain Discord Server can become a platform for this, but I’m also looking for other ideas.

The pixeltrain Academy is developing, but I would like to find other platforms for mutual exchange.

For example, live events like the View Conference in Turin, which kindly gives me the opportunity every year to talk about open-source tools like Blender and Godot and to offer training sessions for indies. If you have any further ideas on this, I would be happy to talk about them.

Here are the two big topic areas I want to focus on this year:

Blender for Production

Blender is now widespread in the 3D, animation, VFX and games industries and is already widely accepted. Therefore, having in-depth Blender production knowledge can now be a ticket to a professional career entry.

But Blender is also the all-round solution for artists who work on indie projects, set up indie studios or simply work on their private projects.

I would like to help here and provide suitable training material.

Godot Game Development for Indies

The second big area I want to focus on is game design and development with Godot. Again, it is FOSS – Free Open Source software. For the same reasons I chose Blender.

Godot is available to everyone free of charge, but is also open source. Therefore, there are no license changes, restrictions or anything similar to worry about. And we saw a lot of this in the games sector last year. It has been shown that only „free of charge“ can be very dangerous, Unity, Unreal and others have shown this clearly this year and have threatened the existence of many projects in development and the artists behind them.

Godot is already a capable 2D and 3D (more and more) game engine with a constant and community-driven development cycle.

Godot has its own, highly effective scripting language with GD Script, which is also easy to learn for beginners. Anyone who comes from professional game development, for example from Unity, can also work in C#. Many free add-ons (plugins) extend Godot, similar to what we know from Blender.

The created games or applications can be exported for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android and, with the help of third-party providers, also on consoles such as XBOX, Playstation and Nintendo Switch.

Game design and development is the consistent development of telling stories and building new user experiences. In addition to the 2D and 3D environment, audio and interactivity give artists further opportunities for expression.

I am currently in the process of transferring, adapting and expanding my long-standing Unity training concepts to Godot. Therefore, I hope that I will soon be able to present you new tutorials, publications and training courses on Godot.

In addition to these projects, I continue to train Blender in company training, one-to-ones and for some training providers in order to be able to pay my bills.

I look forward to your feedback and am excited to see what this new year brings us.

Thank you and best regards

Helge

P.S. If you want to support me and get ad-free tutorials, discount vouchers and more, please consider to become a Patreon. Thanks 🙂