Other
Ok, so yes. Big jump in the day numbers on these posts. Bigger than I intended, I’ll admit. I had intended to take a few days off from everything, and I did. I hadn’t really intended to let the blog posts get this far behind, but I did that too.
So, why count this as day 123, rather than day 92? Because I’ve been absent, but I have not been idle. Even on the few days that I did actually use as pure vacation I still ended up doing a bit of learning or practicing, and honestly skipping day numbers would just make things really confusing.
So what have I been up to? Game development, mostly, along with planning out upcoming story lines for Taloria, and my plan for approaching the upcoming NaNoWriMo challenge, as was the original plan. I’ll admit that that particular plan has changed a bit, but I’ll get into that in a minute.
This is one of the games that I put together this last month. There’s a second one, but I wanted to put a bit more polish on it before publishing, and I simply didn’t have the time, I needed to shift focus to NaNoWriMo. With any luck I’ll get back to it before long and it will be playable as well.
I decided that rather than trying to jump directly into one of my more fully fledged game ideas, like Runic Alchemy, I needed to spend some time building up my skill set, much like I’ve been doing with all of the other skills. So the plan is to release a series of very small, very simple games that I can use as practice pieces, both for the programming skills, and for some additional practice at creating the art and music assets for them.
I also managed to get some work done on That Explained, finally finishing out my Simple Synopsis pages for the first season of Daredevil.
Writing 30/30 – Day 1
Which brings me to the new challenge, and the start of NaNoWriMo.
Much like my revelation with the video games, I realized part way through October that I’m again trying to fly before I can crawl. Serial Experiment started out as a way to continually practice my writing, enhancing my skills over time with a continual story. Unfortunately it then morphed into a multi-year epic tale with multiple series of stories that overlap and influence each other. I think that in the end the overall story that comes out of it will be much better as a result, but it also means that the project as a whole is now much more complex than it was originally intended to be, and honestly at this point it’s beyond my skill level to pull off if I want to do it any justice, and I do.
So, following the same “back to basics” mentality that I have been applying to my game development work, I decided that I am not ready to write the next chapters of Serial Experiment as my novel submission for this year’s NaNoWriMo. Instead, I wanted to do something more stand alone. Something that would let me practice writing a single piece, rather than just a piece of a larger whole. And, in keeping with the continuing theme, I decided that this year instead of a straight traditional novel, I’d write an interactive visual novel.
Well, I say visual novel, but honestly what I’m planning is likely to be more of a hybrid of a visual novel, a text adventure, and an immersive sim, with a bit of Metroidvania thrown in for color. I’m planning a few visual elements, but the overall goal is to have most of the story presented as traditional text. I have the basic story plotted out, though I still have a long way to go on the details, so we’ll have to see how the whole thing turns out, and if I can actually produce enough material to meet the NaNoWriMo 50,000 word count target. Once the novelization of the game is complete I can dive into actually coding it up in game form, and if the end result is remotely playable I may try to actually get it published somewhere.
Today’s efforts involved the very beginning, writing out the first draft of the game’s introductory elements, along with some overall planning and development for the story.
Of course, even with the plot fully formed, characters fully fleshed out, knowing exactly what I need to write, 30 minutes a day over 30 days won’t be nearly enough time to get the full 50,000 words out, and I don’t have any of those things just yet. I’m still keeping it at a 30/30 challenge, I may not be able to write more than that on any given day, but I’ll have to put in some serious overtime if I’m going to get this novel completed.