Diana Update #8
Hi there! It's been a while. A lot has happened in my life in the past six months, but almost none of it was in the form of 'personal project updates', so I've been unfortunately neglecting this. It's still the same now, so this update will be very heavy on the 'how is my life going' part of things.
Life Updates
I'll just put this as a list, because paragraphs are hard:
- I live in Seattle now, and I've been here since November. So...almost six months. It's still hard to believe that I actually live hear and am not just visiting.
- I work for Oculus as a software engineer, so working on VR stuff now! (Oculus is owned by Facebook, so I didn't technically change employers.) VR's really cool, but I get very motion sick if I use it for too long.
- I got sick with a particularly nasty cold in February, which knocked me out for a month.
- I got really into keyboards, and will be building my own keyboard whenever the parts ship. This might take a while, because no one buys keyboard parts.
Farsider Corner
For those who are new: Farsider is my big project currently, and is a dungeon crawler about ghosts and teenaged angst. Every email has an update on it, and at some point in the near future this note will also point to a public devlog.
So the good news is that, after a long wait, I got approval from Facebook to develop and publish devlogs for Farsider. The bad news is that because of how hectic my life's become, I haven't really had the chance to actually work on Farsider recently.
That doesn't mean I don't think about it, a lot. I don't think I was ever satisfied with the story that I wrote, so I'm constantly going it over in my head and attempting to work out its problems.
One of the big issues that's been plaguing me narratively is how to start the game. Farsider takes place in a world of spirits, one meant to be entirely unlike our own. At the same time, the main characters are established early on to be from a world that is much more similar to the real world, and they're humans now trapped in a world they don't understand.
So then how do I establish that, without resorting to just outright stating it in text? I think part of that is simply the 'tutorial' part of the game - the player will start the game with no context, and the game has to teach them what the goals of the game are and how to play it. But if the protagonist is also supposed to be just as clueless, then what?
The game that I've played whose premise is most similar to Farsider's opening is probably Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. That game starts you off in the 'real' world, which lasts for very, very little time in gameplay before being replaced with the 'fantastic' world, of which the protagonist knows nothing about. Parts of the tutorial (such as the battle system) is taught through a third-person narrator who instructs you on the system, and part of it comes from a friendly pixie, which is the first character you meet.
I've noticed that a lot of game openings don't have quite as strong a 'motivation hook' as prose stories - by which I mean that the protagonist can just be dumped somewhere without any goals, and the player can wander around until a goal comes into view. This is in contrast with many books, where the general wisdom is to give the protagonist a goal and some trouble as soon as possible. At this point, I am more used to writing prose than I am writing games, and so maybe that's contributing to my current confusion.
Writing openings is hard.
Other Projects
As mentioned above, I've been writing a lot.
One is a prose project. I don't have much to show there, other than to say that I'll be working on it in the month of June. I'm not sure yet how exactly I want it to be published.
One is a visual novel. It's currently in the polish stage, as all writing and art assets have been created, but that polish takes a lot of time. It's a slice(?) of life story that takes place 50 years before the end of the world. Here's one of the images from it:
Everything Else
I started this email list with the intention of it being bi-weekly, which clearly isn't working considering the 5-month gap from the last update. I'm also not sure how much a regular update schedule helps me now, since my general patterns are to do bursts of work for months at a time, and then do nothing for a few months, then repeat.
So from here on out, the email update schedule will probably become rather sporadic. If I have a lot to say, there will be more updates. If nothing's happening, no one needs to know that. I'll never send more than one email a week since that just becomes spam.
Anyway, that's all for this time. Thanks for reading!
Doodlin'
I haven't been drawing enough lately. I also have been watching a lot of anime (Revolutionary Girl Utena, specifically), and now I want to get better at drawing backgrounds. I have not been drawing backgrounds.