Introductions
Hi there!
I remembered that at some point in the past, I decided to start an email list to keep people updated on what I was doing and how life was going...and then I never actually used it for anything.
Well, better late than never, as they say. I've been keeping a journal of my daily accomplishments (...to some success) over the past few months, and figured I might as well fold it all together and actually tell people what I'm doing. And maybe some cool things along the way.
The plan is to keep this entirely informal, and hopefully fairly brief. I'll be sending an email generally once every two weeks, possibly changing up the times depending how life goes. I'll keep you updated on what I'm working on, as well as some interesting things that I've been looking at. I'm rather inclined to ranting about topics that I'm interested in, so you might get a little introduction or tutorials to various unrelated fields...which may be further refined into articles later on. Yes, I'm kind of using this to 'beta run' my writing.
Plus some artwork, from which you'll very quickly learn that I have become an anime. If you didn't know that already.
Please feel free to write back or talk to me on messenger / groupme / twitter / however you normally reach me if you want me to go into more depth about something, or if you just want to talk about anything~
What I've been working on
Like always, I'm suffering from working-on-50-projects-at-once syndrome. I spent the last year writing a fantasy novel as a thesis for college, and in the process developed and refined the fantasy world (called Arkhilt) that I've been imagining since childhood. So a lot of my personal projects involve exploring that world in some ways. Mainly through games and art and writing, nowadays.
Farsider
My current long-term project is a game called Farsider. It's a narrative-heavy exploration game about ghosts and teenage angst. Since it's such a big project, I'll have a section dedicated to it on weeks where I'm working on it, as otherwise Farsider talk would take up the whole email.
RPG??
A friend and I have been playing around with making a fantasy role-playing game together, but that's probably something for the far future. We've been designing characters though and doing some worldbuilding, of which sketches and doodles are starting to float around to my social media sites. We have 3 main characters designed right now, probably will have 6 total. We really like vests and longcoats.
3D Modelling
I've also been playing around a lot with Blender and 3D modeling in general - mostly with the interest in making models for future games (that I shouldn't be thinking of right now). The main draw of doing so is to simplify animations: if you have a character that needs to be animated in the four cardinal directions, in 2D you'd need to draw the animation 3 times (front view, back view, and side view)...whereas in 3D, you animate once and rotate the camera.
...well, that's the theory, but it was a lot rougher than expected? At some point in the near future I might put together what I've learned, and put it into one of these emails.
Farsider Corner
Current progress on Farsider has mostly been with writing - I last touched the script nearly two years ago, when the game was little more than an idea to spend my college free time on, and the world and my writing has evolved since then.
The game takes place in the Farside, a world comprised of the thoughts, fears, and beliefs of all of humanity as interpreted through a spirit that admires, but has not met with, humans. It follows three estranged high school friends who find themselves trapped in this strange world, and their attempts to understand it, and find each other and a way home.
It's very angsty, because I'm very angsty. It's been rather interesting to write, since it's full of awkward conversations - the main characters are only sort of friends, the spirits of the Farside are only sort of like humans, yet there's nothing 'false' about any of it. I don't know. Writing is hard.
Misc. Ramblings
Today's rambling is about text editing. Specifically, editing game scripts and the like.
A bit of context: I do almost all of my writing (including this email) in the same text editor I use for coding, and I store everything as .txt files. It's a bit strange, but it's very useful for me: unlike Microsoft Word or Docs or other word-processing software, code / text editors don't display any formatting by default (and .txt doesn't store anything except plain text) - so no bolding or italicizing.
But that means that the files can be edited by practically any program, and I know exactly their contents. (I could go into a whole tirade about the DOCX file format - I spent a month a few years back trying to understand it, and there's a lot going on in there.) Also, there are all kinds of human-readable markup languages that you can use to mark bold text or other formatting, like Markdown, which I use for practically all of my writing.
Anyway, Markdown has served me very well for most writing, but I hit a snag when trying to write Farsider: namely, 1. it's more screenplay than prose, since it's almost entirely dialogue, and 2. Farsider's final form isn't a PDF or DOCX file, but rather a video game. I wanted to be able to write it in a format that can easily be read by a program so I could directly feed it to my game engine.
There are several systems in place for such a thing: Renpy is a visual-novel engine with its own markup language for writing scripts, and Yarn and Twine are used to make choice-based games, with Yarn having an exporter for Unity on top of that. But neither of these work natively with Game Maker, which is what I'm using for Farsider (...and probably will for all future projects), and writing a program to convert them might be more trouble than it's worth.
There are also programs like articy:draft that allow you to write branching narratives and game scripts from a bigger suite, but then we run back to the issue of using Microsoft Word, in that I'm kind of a stickler for plaintext. (Also, these programs typically cost more money than I'm willing to invest at this point.)
So as it stands, I've been writing the script in straight-up prose, without any dialogue markers (so no 'he said' or 'she said' after the dialogue.) It works for a rough, but would be impractical to program, or even share the raw script for a beta-read, so I'm still wondering what to do.
Doodle
Here's the design for one of the main characters in that RPG-concept. (I've also put up a different sketch online, so you might've seen that one already) She doesn't have a name yet, but I've started calling her Roadsign because she looks like a road sign.
The original concept was 'magic tattoos on both arms', and I envision her being a party buffer/debuffer.
That's all for now!