A Year in Recap · 11:10pm Dec 31st, 2015
This is where I look back on the past year, raise my glass of gin, and cry.
Or well, not cry completely, but just a little.
I managed to get a lot done on the programming front and on the school front. My gpa has been steadily rising since the burnt out disaster of a semester I had last year. The cause of the burn out was not so much the level of school work, but the level of school work not affording me time to work on personal projects. Don't take 5 classes, kids. At least not if you're going to school year-round.
But enough about my personal life that I've never seen anyone give much of a shit about; let's talk writing.
2015 has been a sparse year for me, the only two fics I published having been A Darkened Land and Good Morning, Celestia. I could have done more, but I'm extremely proud of the writing I've produced this year. There are another two stories I wrote (about 20k words in total) which I dropped for one reason or another haven't yet gotten around to fixing up. All in all, I feel I've begun to settle into my writing. All that's left is to refine the process and turn up the speed. I know I'm capable of producing stories with extreme speed. The first chapter of Let's Find You a Date, 7k words, was written in one day. Most of the first chapter of Fluttershy's House of Villains (around 8k) was also written in a single day. I've also written numerous 3k chapters in single sittings, such as Good Morning, Celestia.
Sometimes I feel like the problem is that I can type much faster than I can come up with narrative, leading to a jittery "start-stop-start-stop" which prevents me to getting into the flow. When I can keep up? It's like goddamn magic. To me, at least.
I'm taking fewer classes this semester with the hopes of getting more side projects done and also getting a coop job. The last week I've gotten back into averaging 750 words each day.
Sorely tempted to block reddit, leave chats I'm in, and try to get away from distractions (video games would have to stay; they're career-related). I'm at a point where what I want to do requires a massive amount of time and the level of discipline needed to spend so much time "working" is more than I honestly have. If I were to summarize it: I want to spend 2 hours each day writing, 2 hours programming, 2 hours learning art, and 2 hours of video games/movies/reading. That's 8 hours of activity without taking into account school or life. To actually pull that off, I would have to be way more efficient with my time than I currently am.
Ahhhh fuck I don't know where I'm going with this.
It's weird for all the time I spend playing competitive games, RPGs, and min-maxing in them, I can't even min-max my own time. I remember reading somewhere that a study found the difference between "master" musicians and "genius" musicians was in how they managed their time. Both were heavily dedicated to their craft, but one had learned to be more efficient with how they spent their time, resulting in better learning and more practice.
Weirdly enough, I had something of a moment of introspection while playing Modern Warfare 3--or rather, from one of the quotes that pops up when you die. The quote was:
"A man who would not risk his life for something does not deserve to live."
-Martin Luther King
First off, I thought it was kind of a presumptuous and shitty quote, but it got me thinking about what I would give for the sake of creating something great. Would I die for art? Well, no. Because that's fucking stupid and makes no sense. But would I give my life for art? That's something I'd strongly consider.
Then why was I wasting so much time? I have grand aspirations, the kind that sound stupid to say out loud (and so I won't), and the kind that I may very likely fail to achieve (or at the very least fall short of) so why was I spending so much time progressing nowhere? Or rather, it's not that in the overall scheme of things I'm not progressing forwards, but I'm not progressing forwards as much as I could be.
So, uh, well shit. I have a bunch of stuff to think about. Those of you who read my stuff don't have to worry about me going anywhere--at least not without tying up loose ends. And those of you off celebrating new years who got bogged down by the defeatist tone of this blog, welp. Sorry.
Still not sure if anyone reads these things at any rate.
Something that drastically altered my creative journey was my computer decaying to a point where it was too shit to play games. As a result the only thing I could do for about a year was watch movies, and I appointed myself the mission of watching 'all the classics that people quote and refer to, but I've never got around to watching'.
I feel like that did more than anything I've ever done towards improving my writing.
Good movies, like good books, are like food for the brain. They give you new characters, new settings, new ideas, new vocabulary, new ways to structure your thoughts. You can get that out of a game, but not out of replaying a game. If you're worried about artistic progress you could do way worse than putting on a classic movie instead.
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Well, I mean, my presents for Christmas were two computer science/programming textbooks, I'm currently reading Godel, Escher, Bach and I tend to be more into Scorcese, Tarintino, and Fincher than Whedon or Abrams. The fiction books I got for Christmas were 2 philosophical books and I read a lot more literature rather than pulp. The games I play are mostly skill-based and challenging, have some brilliant narrative, or have some brilliant game design. (one of three: mechanics, storytelling, game design)
Good advice, but I think I'm already more or less following it. I try to keep myself grounded somewhat near mainstream though. You see a lot of people "float off into the void" when they get too wrapped up in that sort of stuff.
Not sure if you're aware, but I'm primarily a game developer and programmer rather than a writer. I'm set to graduate with a computer science degree in the next year or so, and I do a fair amount of game development in my free time. My art (eventually...) and writing are both things I hope to bring to my games. The aspirations I mentioned were really that I hope to transform the medium of games, to the point where somewhere in the future people will go "here is what we thought of games before <my name> began, and here's what we think of them now". I see so much untapped potential in them, mostly because the creation of them is a royal mess.
Games are primarily designed and developed by the programmers. Not always, but primarily. You would in all honesty be shocked at how many game developers say they don't play games, some even taking pride in that fact. It's as mind-boggling to me as writers who would take pride in saying they don't read books.
Anyway, that's what I hope to do. Strike out in the young medium and change it. Moreover to make such a name for myself that I have the influence and ability to take full control of projects and fulfill whatever my vision might be.
A bit ambitious, right? It's why I'm spread so thin: I'm trying to learn programming on the "creating my own 3D game engines" level while completing a degree, writing, trying to learn art, and maybe even trying to squeeze in some voice acting.
I believe I'll need to know all of it though.
I did a three month stretch last Fall where I tried to do nothing all day except write. I didn't have work or school at the time, so it ended up being my sole focus. The first month went by well enough, but by week 6 or 7 my productivity really dropped. Maybe I didn't have enough projects to jump between. By week 10 I was miserable and had a Diablo marathon. It felt nice.
I'll be buggered if I can remember where I saw the quote or who said it, but every time I stumble on it I remember that my ideas and motivations don't exist in a vacuum. It's okay for me to shotgun three hours of Rebuild of Evangelion, rewatch Monty Oum's early work a dozen times, and generally consume the products of other people's imaginations.
I've been writing this comment for the better part of an hour. I seem to have lost my original point some in the ether. Oh, right. Wasting time. I've often felt that doing things I enjoy rather than actively working on something is a waste of time. I make an effort to remember that input is essential to output. My ideas and style are informed by what I read, watch, and do, so not partaking in these things only dulls my sense and imagination.
Edit: Yeah, basically what Thanquol said. If you want an example of a game that was nearly whipped up by a single person, Dust: An Elysian Tail fits the bill. Dodrill did everything except the music and voice work himself over the course of nearly four years. I played the game and thought it was quite a bit of fun.
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Yep, I know about Dust and the story behind it. The news that it was made by a single guy over 4 years got it some attention in the gamedev community. I was really surprised by how smooth the combat felt.
There are many games which are the effort of a smaller, concentrated team. Something like 2 programmers, 1 artist, and a couple people commissioned for sound. Rivals of Aether is a bit like that iirc, and so was Bastion originally, I think. No Man's Sky is being developed by ~10 developers if I recall right. I'd really love to have a small, skilled team like that to work in and lead creatively. I hope to spend 2-4 years in AAA at 2 or 3 different studios in order to see how things are done there before settling back to a smaller, indie team.
3654740 I have a bunch of friends doing game development and all I can say is that it sounds crazy hard and I'm glad I'm not doing it.
While setting yourself a crazy goal and going for it is awesome I do advise a slight shifting of your thinking. Don't think, 'if I succeed at this I will be Internet Famous'; that's kind of a dark path. Pick a person who you love and admire and say, 'I want to make a game that this specific person thinks is the best game ever'. Changing the world is big, abstract and difficult to measure and can easily lead to the kind of negative feelings that inspired this blog post. I struggled with that for years.
Changing one person's life is within everyone's abilities. It lets you know for sure if you've succeeded or failed. And if you've put the right love and care in, you'll have made something so good that it ripples out into broader success. Make creation an act of love rather than an act of ego.
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Oh, I'm absolutely not going for fame. Like I said, I want to take the medium forward and create things on a level that hasn't been done. It's not about popularity; it's about taking things to new heights.
If I were to pick a gamedev I admire, it would definitely be Jonathan Blow. He created Braid which was a fantastic game puzzle game full of hidden meanings, and now he's developing The Witness and working on a new programming language designed for game development. He's not just a brilliant game designer and developer, but also a brilliant programmer on a technical level, with an absolutely fantastic mind for creating and solving puzzles.
The negative feelings aren't inspired by anything popularity related. It's mostly frustration because I know I could be doing more. Anyone ever is probably aware that there's something they could be doing better. To some degree I feel like that frustration is a necessity to give me drive.
The things I create are out of love for art. My parents were both professional animators, and I was raised around so much storytelling and art. I think all I really strive for in what I create is for my work to have a profound effect on those who read it. Those can be few people who read it, or more. Preferably more to see my hard work go farther, and reach more people, but primarily I want to create things which linger in the mind long after the reader is done with them. That's where my desire to have my works affect the very medium itself come from. I want to have someone go up to people, 10 years after they've viewed my work, and upon mentioning it have them go, "That, ah yes. I remember that."
And again, I don't believe it's a matter of ego. I'd maybe even find it preferable if I did it all under a pseudonym, keeping my real identity a secret. Andrew Stanton, a screenwriter at pixar, talks about what I mean here at 15m20s:
I think that's the best way to describe what drives me in doing all this. I've experienced this so many times in my life from all the various things books, movies, shows, and games I've consumed, that I have a strong desire to "pass it on".
3655541 A good sentiment, and I concur to it.