Diana Update #6: Motion
Hi there!
I can't believe it's been almost another month since the last update??? It feels like time is really flying by quickly. Although in my defense, I just moved across the country. I'm now in Seattle, working as a software engineer for Facebook (actual team role still to be determined). I'm going to keep writing and drawing and making games in my spare time, of course, but seeing as Seattle is actually a city, I'll likely actually be doing more social things outside of my room for once.
In any case, I'm pretty excited! ...though I should probably find myself a permanent address soon.
What I've been working on
I have a day job now, but I'm still spending my free time on various projects.
I've actually spent a lot of time recently writing, mainly editing older works and writing down personal thoughts or other posts. I mentioned a few emails back that there was this novel-length story called Crimson I'd written years ago that I was sitting on. This past week I cracked it open and rewrote the first chapter, and began editing the rest. It's a somewhat cyberpunk story about a police officer and the unintentional leader of a hacker gang, and their involvement in a city-wide conspiracy regarding a computer-controlled drug.
Once I'm satisfied with my editing, my plan is to serialize this story online, posting a chapter every few days or so (not sure yet about the timing). I'm not sure exactly the logistics of this yet, whether I should host it somewhere or build a site or whatever, and I've got a few suggestions to put it on Amazon or back it with Patreon - either way, if you have any insight as to where this story might live, definitely let me know.
I've gotten a lot better at writing - it's remarkably different than the version from 3 years ago, and I think a lot of that is simply that I'm more capable of saying things directly now. I've been taught over in over again that in stories you should 'show not tell', but for setting up a scene or orienting a reader to a new concept or world, sometimes an infodump is the most efficient and entertaining way to do it.
Farsider Corner
I finally pulled together all of the pieces I've been working on for Farsider over the months, and merged them into the base game project. So now we've got procedurally generated levels! (Design of the generator still needs tweaking.) An inventory! The ability to play an entire dungeon from beginning to end, even though there's nothing in it!
It's still exciting. I mentioned before how I was always struggling between making Farsider an aesthetic experience and providing entertaining gameplay, and coming up with non-combat-related gameplay, and I think I'm reaching a point where I'm satisfied with the direction it's heading. I'm not sure I can call it 'fun', considering I've played the same levels over and over for testing, but it's starting to look like what I've always imagined it to.
Though at some point, I'm going to have to develop the cutscenes engine, and that's not fun.
Oh, and now that Farsider's coming together, I'm (finally) creating a development log for it. So future Farsider Corners might be a bit shorter, as I start putting my updates into a more polished, blog-gy form. It's not quite ready yet, but will definitely be by the next email, so I'll show it to you all then!
Misc. Rambling
Let's talk, very briefly, about the intersection between writing and giant explosions in games.
Okay, that was just to catch interest. But it is something I've been thinking about - specifically, the intention behind why you put giant explosions in games.
When do giant explosions happen? Usually when something big happens. A building blows up. A giant enemy dies. Stuff like that. A game puts them in to signify that something major has happened, just like smaller effects are used to signal other things happening.
In the end, game effects, such as explosions, screen shakes, sword trails, dust clouds, or any other visual effect, all serve as a form of communication. Things explode when they are destroyed, the screen shakes when your character gets hit (or whatever), and sword trails tell you where your sword is swinging when the actual sword is moving too fast for you to see. Also, they look cool, and make the game look fun to play.
But as cool as those effects are, their usage must match the intention of what they're trying to communicate. If you add an effect to a game for the coolness, rather than for a form of communication, then there's a chance that players will misunderstand what the effect is being used for. For example if you make a game where everything explodes all the time, then explosions by themselves lose all their meaning. If you pile on too many effects at once, the game itself might become hard to see. (There's always the chance of misunderstanding whenever you make anything, but if you know your own reasons for using a particular tool or effect, you'll be more equipped to understand how people will interact with it.)
So what does this have to do with writing?
I think about intention a lot when writing pieces or stories - why does this sentence exist? Why use this word in this particular situation? There are undoubtedly words that are just 'cool', or phrases that sound amazing in a vacuum, but then if they're put together in an article or a story, you have to consider the effects they have. All words have a meaning, and ultimately are used to communicate a particular thought, and that in the end is more important than how they sound. Of course, with enough skill, one can wrangle the text such that they read well and communicate well (just like great games use effects in such a way that they look amazing and can communicate the game mechanics).
But either way, as a designer or a writer, there always has to be a why for every piece that goes into a work, so that the creator's intentions can be better communicated.
Doodle
UM so tinyletter's image uploading seems broken??? So sadly, there will be no doodle today. :<