We were lucky to catch up with Patrick Durbin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Patrick, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

As one who has multiple skills for the ever-changing world of interactive entertainment, I feel like I have been learning various arts for my various crafts further back than I can remember. Even at a young age, I was very curious about a multitude of creative endeavors. I enjoyed the general arts such as music and drawing but I also recall even in elementary school questioning what made my favorite experiences so memorable while others I found myself not caring for as much. I came to some very wild and unusual conclusions and some were coincidental accidents that I would later learn did not work out but happened to work out within the small space of entertainment I was studying. That is the process of learning sometimes.

Even in school, I took creative electives when I could squeeze them in. I took orchestra for seven years, took on some personal studies about music composition, a few drawing classes all the way through university. Even my first personal spare time project after graduation was experimenting with various ways of using filters in Photoshop to transform an image into an entirely different art style.

There have been a lot of skills for me to learn and grow with and I know there are many more for me to still dig further deeper into, but the most important details for learning so much is understanding a core breakdown with an eagerness to learn and adapt. The creative arts are very fluid and always changing. The mentality to take should not be to go “I understand how this works and it will create this result” as by the time you hit that point, everything around that point has changed and entertainment is already moving on to the next thing.

As for obstacles, the biggest obstacles have always been the two great obstacles that plague many in creative endeavors, time and money. However, such obstacles are faced by everyone in some way and taking a deep understanding of one’s limitations and resources can open doors to beautiful and creative solutions that can shift the world into new directions not yet considered before.

Patrick, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I began NR, utd. while I was still enrolled in University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, AZ. In entertainment, one is known for their portfolio and I had always wanted to create my own company, so I rolled my first few projects along with creating my company to accomplish both goals at the same time. By the time I graduated, I had two games accomplished and began to explore my options while also realizing the instability of focusing soling on video games. With this realization, I began to expand development to toolkits and programs that provided a creative space for users to develop freely within. I also saw the trend of growing interest in 3D entertainment but the barrier to entry at the time was still quite high for the average Joe to explore. I looked into methods of making the readily available 2D art editing programs to create 3D spaces for the user to explore and create simple scenes with. This is when development for Tinker Time came to development. The engine to create Tinker Time did have plans for becoming transformed into a video game engine but the budget and requirement to market it were well beyond the resources I could find.

After exploring options and seeing the current state of the entertainment, the team and myself took the chance to join the arcade market before it was too late. We developed a Mantis Shuffle for the arcades and built the arcade cabinets in-house to cut corners. It was an unforgettable project but quite the ferocious task to ensure the quality of both the hardware and software after putting it together, which was after years of development of the software side. When it was done, it felt a little late but not quite late enough to catch the last hoorah of the arcade industry. Even amongst my other peers, very few around my age have had such an opportunity to work on such a project.

Currently, NR, utd.’s attention has shifted towards storytelling works, music jingles and the large task of bringing a very renewed and refreshing perspective to the fighting genre of video games. I have also begun avenues of influencer coaching for content creators to provide a means of guidance in a neighboring industry while using my connections and experience to help the content creators grow further.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

For this, I’ll focus my answer to answering for the video games industry. If I were to delve into answering this for each field or art, I’d end up writing a book to this question.

I frequently see such a plethora of players comments and backlash towards developers of video game companies from the smallest of studios to the largest of AAA players. I feel much of this comes from how secretive the industry behaves and waiting until one is ready for launch to start giving out teasers and announcement trailers. To those on the outside of the industry, it provides a very limited view of what happens during development, little information about the many trials during development before hitting that goal where it starts to go public, and unrealistic expectations that the players put together about an estimate of how long a process takes. While I can’t say it is a bad decision, as market behavior has a way of this decision paying off much better than being open through the entire development process and sharing all of the problems along the way, this misconception creates a great gap of what players understand and the reality of what happens behind the curtain. One can easily skim through comments on Valve’s Steam store, comment sections on video gaming article sites, reddit forum threads dedicated to gaming, and more to see all sorts of comments that shows an expectation not met from the playerbase. Part of this expectation may be set up in the player community’s head about what they think and expect from something, which can easily be quite different from what happened during development.

Thanks to daring and open developers in the crowdsourcing world, there are more details than ever revealed about the process from the indie developer side. It still has a long way to go in this process but it is starting to change. This process will still have a long journey to go, especially as practices that help projects market better created this large gap of information and sometimes expectations that end up unrealistic, but I feel we will gradually see this problem get better for those who listen and keep an open mind even if very small steps at a time, we can look forward to a future where there is much greater excitement and player expectations coming closer to being met and creating a happier experience for all involved in production.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

This has been the golden ticket answer many of us are scratching our heads and staying up to the late hours of the night trying to figure out, especially for those looking for a way to help artists and creative at all levels and sizes.

The big answer is getting a lot of people to do all of the small, little things. Simple things like telling people about the small one-man show one caught, telling others about the small story by an author one likes but nobody has heard of, a simple retweet of a tweet of the milestone reached by a small creative, or even just mentioning during water cooler talk about the new YouTube channel one caught that looks like it has potential. All of these are simple and easily accessible actions of something one enjoyed but many shy away from sharing their experience from the lesser known creatives to instead mention the bigger, more popular shows and events.

There have even been a few studies exploring how the mention of sharing these experiences from a single person only has a small impact but as more people share enjoying a show or event, the wanting to catch this experience of the one being told about it grows greatly. As that continues to build, it starts to become irresistible to not catch the creative’s next experience.

Lastly, the feeling of getting to know an artist or creative while they are small and watching them grow into a major name into their field is such a magical journey of a feeling to enjoy. Those memories of being one of the first to share and get people excited about a future gem is quite a precious journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nrutd.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NrUtd
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninrac
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/NinRac
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChsc-NMBHjVQQvkExu3HlnA

Image Credits
Elysia Griffin