Category: The Journey

Ok, so a couple of months without blog updates, a bit more than intended but sometimes that’s how it goes.

Once the Writing 30/30 was complete I was able to throw myself almost entirely into the creation of Maelstrom, my afore-mentioned first ever “real” video game. And I’m pleased to say that the process is nearly complete. Absolute strangers are actually playing it now, as it works its way through the beta testing process. Of course that also means that I’m having to figure out how to run a beta test myself, but it never hurts to learn new things.

That being said, I’ve mostly stopped new development on the game for the time being, letting the testers run it through its paces. I have several more updates planed with a variety of new features and things I’d like to see, but I want to get it out in its current version, actually live and in the store, before I dive any deeper. In the meantime I’ve begun the exploration and design phase of the follow up game in between work and sessions of the excellent Breath of the Wild.

And, while it was nice being able to simply focus in on a specific project for a while, and then equally nice taking a bit of a breather after all of that intense study, the last couple of weeks I’ve been feeling the itch that I just haven’t been doing enough. I don’t think I’m going to launch into another 30/30, at least not in the way that I have been, but I do like the feeling of directed accomplishment that comes along with it. So I think for the upcoming month I’ll do something similar, but reviewing all of the skills that I’ve covered so far, sort of a targeted refresher. I’m honestly not sure at this point beyond ensuring that at least some time each day gets devoted specifically to work for Illustrious Kingdom, and the various projects that fall under its umbrella.

Actually, to be honest, I think I’m going to try a slightly different tactic. Before I started doing the 30/30 challenges I had set myself up with a specific dedicated hour of project time each work day. I had specific projects that I was working on each day and a whole schedule laid out to allow for the different things I wanted to accomplish. All of that kind of went out the window when I decided that I would benefit more from taking the time to hone my different crafts. So the current plan for February is to get back to schedule, only with general learning and review rather than the pre-planned projects. That should give me the best of both worlds, adequate time to practice and grow as an artist, but with more structure including breaks to avoid burnout.

Writing 30/30 – Day 30

Ok, yes, I realize that I have been absolutely terrible at updating the blog. Especially egregious since I’m also ignoring the vlog entirely, not only in creating new content, but in actually editing and posting the remaining content that I already have. And I’ve already pointed out that I’m aware of the irony that during the 30/30 for writing, I have had the most trouble coming here to do exactly that.

Part of it, I think, is that I’ve been too busy writing to write. By which I mean while this does technically count as writing, its not really the sort of thing that I was aiming for in this challenge. So I was never planning to count time spent writing this blog toward my challenge time, though I do admit that a couple of the days were spent updating my other blog, catching up on articles. It’s bordering on cheating, but still counts. Regardless, most of the actual writing came down to the very end of the day, and on most days once it was done it was past time to be sleeping, so blogging just wasn’t the priority.

For what it’s worth, I actually did manage to write something for at least thirty minutes every day during this challenge, or at least work on writing in the case of the first couple of weeks when I was still planning and plotting a novel, and that’s as much a part of writing as actually putting pen to paper, or fingers to keys in my case. After the realization that the novel simply wasn’t happening, I shifted my focus to shorter projects, and on trying to hit variety. The writing equivalent of doodles. I wrote a couple of short stories, an essay, a Seuss style poem. Streams of consciousness from the perspectives of different characters. It was a good experience over all, stretching the creative muscles, trying out new styles. Ultimately that’s what I wanted to get out of the challenge, like with all of the challenges.

Other

Of course, even though it was the writing challenge, the bulk of the creative work done this last month ended up being on a completely different project. I’ve become thoroughly immersed in the creation of my first real video game. I’ve made a few games already, depending on how you want to define that, so it’s not exactly the first one ever. But for the first time I’ve managed to make something that you could consider financially viable as a game. Something that wouldn’t seem out of place in the app store. It’s still a work in progress, and I’ve still got a ways to go before its actually ready for production, but it’s coming along remarkably fast, and I think it actually has the potential to be a mild to moderate hit. I don’t expect it to be extremely popular, I likely won’t get many installs off of it, and I almost certainly won’t make any money worth talking about, but I can’t wait to be able to accurately say that I put out a real game, that real people could and actually might want to install and play.

Writing 30/30 – Day 13

Alright, I’ll admit it. I very nearly lost the challenge last night. I may have gotten a bit sidetracked working on my next game prototype, and very nearly ran out of time for writing. Hence why blog post update is happening the day after, despite having promised myself I would stop doing that because it keeps leading to me forgetting to actually update the silly thing.

I did write though, and it felt good. After coming to terms with not being able to complete the NaNoWriMo deadline I spent the day I skipped blogging about catching up on ThatExplained, putting some work in there. Last night I decided to go full creative, and just wrote a piece off the top of my head. More emotion than story, it’s the gripping tale of the end of a marriage for silly reasons. And it was refreshing.

Writing 30/30 – Day 11

Wow, ok. Is it weird that on the writing 30/30 I’m doing absolutely the worst at actually writing these updates?

They say that the better part of valor is knowing when to retreat. I’m already a third of the way through the month and I still can’t quite get the wrinkles out of this story. While that’s incredibly frustrating I’m trying not to let it get me too far down. At this stage I think its safe to say that I’m not going to hit my word count for NaNoWrimo. I’m still on track for the 30/30, despite missing updates here, I’ve at least worked on the story for half an hour every day. So even knowing that it won’t reach a full length novel, I’m still going to keep going with it.

Writing 30/30 – Day 7

Alright! Another potential breakthrough and major plot hole filled in. Unfortunately the fix represents a major shift in the underlying story, so cleaning up the rubble so I can get on with actually writing the thing is easier said than done, but on the plus side it means that I actually have something that’s potentially viable without having to start over completely from scratch.

Writing 30/30 – Day 6

Alright, so one problem solved, at least. I’ve managed to wrinkle out one of the major plot holes in a way that makes consistent logical sense and should allow the story to move forward. That leaves one major hurdle in the storyline that I just can’t seem to shake.

It really makes you wonder if everybody goes through this sort of thing or not. How many times have novelists come up with something that seems like a great idea at the time, but then falls apart later once you start to get into the details? I’m sure it happens a lot, there are certainly plenty of examples of movies or tv shows where the plot or character motivations get really thin at certain points. Why did that thing happen? Because the movie needed to movie, and couldn’t movie otherwise. I’m trying my best not to be the kind of guy that writes those things, but it does pose a problem sometimes.

Writing 30/30 – Day 5

So, this is what I was afraid of. The downside of switching gears and changing projects this late in the game. I’ve still got 25 days left to complete this writing challenge, to write an entire novel, and what do I find? A major glaring plot hole. The “this doesn’t hold together at all” kind of plot hole that completely negates the entire reason for the story even existing in the first place.

I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with a way around it, attack the story from a different angle, find an alternate setup, alternate motivation. But it’s difficult, and an unfortunate delay. Without knowing how much the story will change, it’s nearly impossible to actually write anything. Very disappointing. Hopefully I’ll work the issues out soon so my writing will actually be for the novel rather than about it.

Writing 30/30 – Day 4

Alright, back in the saddle, two days of blog updates in a row. Wooo!

Alright, tomfoolery aside, I managed to make a bit of progress today. Not much, mind, but some. I actually have names for most of my characters now, and a better idea of the layout of the outpost’s organizational chart. Some of the character’s personalities are starting to come together a little bit as well, which is nice.

I’m still not getting nearly the word count that I’m going to need if I’m going to hit the overall target, but with any luck I’ll be able to start ripping through a lot faster once I have more of the story ironed out.

Writing 30/30 Day 3

Well, I’m already off to a great start. I guess when you take a break from your daily blog posting for a month you sort of get out of the habit. So I missed actually posting yesterday. I did get my 30 minutes in, so there’s that at least.

I will admit that so far the writing isn’t going as smoothly as I would like. I was afraid this might happen, I came to the realization that I needed a different project to work on a bit late in the game, so my new concept is far more light on the conceptualization than I would like. I’m having to try to write and decide what to write at the same time. Still, it’s relatively low stakes, and it’s good practice, so I guess it’s worth while. Three days in and I’ve got nearly 1,200 words in my manuscript, which is far too light, but most of the writing that I’ve done has been going toward the planning rather than the manuscript.

With any luck I’ll be able to pull it all together in time to pull the whole thing off.

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.