Why, hello there, long-neglected blog of mine! (^_^)/)
Hmm, where to start... It has been almost a year since I started up this challenge-idea of mine. I haven't given up on making my current game, but I've pretty much put it back on the drawing board. I know it's not wise to try and do too much with a game, particularly a first game, but I want these games to ultimately reflect what I believe and how I interpret life, the universe and everything. My last idea was fairly shallow, and I felt that it did not reflect how I saw the trait of discipline anymore. I have reflected on the nature and role of self-discipline in life a lot, and my interpretation of it has changed quite a bit since I started the project last year.
I originally saw it as a very cold, stiff and selfish trait, a tool for the ruthlessly ambitious. I saw it as a necessary antithesis to wild, free passion and its excess to be limiting. I felt irritated trying to apply it to my life, and I felt that it went against who I was as a person, a free-spirited boho-artist-type person or whatever. But now I see that it is far from selfish, and not necessarily cold. I see now that it is deeply linked to a person's dependability. It is easy to be inconsistent. It is not easy to always be there, to be someone that people can count on. I have also found that rather than being limiting, that self-discipline is freeing. When you are on top of your duties to others as well as yourself, you have more time. More time to think freely about whatever you want, more time to reflect, dawdle and daydream, without the weight of pressing deadlines.
I'd like to rework my current story to reflect these ideas, to demonstrate to the player how liberating a sense of self-control can be. For the moment, I am thinking about doing 3-week blocks of either coding, writing, art or music. I've, to my amazement, made it into Georgia Tech's Digital Media Masters program, so I've made it my goal to try and finish a rough version of the game by August 17, before Fall semester starts.
I'll also start doing weekly updates to this blog (I promise!) starting today! The next 3 weeks are going to be focused on story-writing, so I won't have anything particularly interesting to show. I've been busy working as an artist on a friend's personal game project, an iOS interactive fiction app that places you in the shoes of a poor single mother. I've also been working at lab under the constantly-inspiring Pearce. Did I mention that I'm also working full-time at an internship as both animator and developer? I feel that picking this project up again around now is a good idea, because in about 3 weeks, lab will end and the CS GRE (which I am being unrealistic and preparing for) will have finally passed, and a huge chunk of free time will finally open up for me! Anyways, here is my timeline as of now:
Red Ice game benchmarks (21 weeks)
August 17 - Temp deadline
3 weeks story 03/24 - 04/13
3 weeks engine 04/14 - 05/04
3 weeks art 05/05 - 05/25
3 weeks story 05/26 - 06/15
3 weeks engine 06/16 - 07/06
3 weeks art 07/07 - 07/27
3 weeks music 07/28 - 08/17
Haha... I expect to flounder and just suck really bad when I actually attempt to tackle music. But I want to at least be able to say I've tried doing it on my own. I think I'll have a much better appreciation for the craft of making it then. I've also always been curious about the process, so we'll see. At the moment I am contemplating if I should recode everything in scratch using something like C++ or just stick to actionscript. I feel like doing it in AS3 will be limiting, but we'll see. I'll make my decision based on the final story! I have a lot of ideas and vague random scenarios which I'll need to boil down and distill into something coherent! By the end of the next three weeks I'll post a summary of the story I'll have concocted by then.
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