New Years, Projects, and Project Management
Hi there! I have an email list, that I sometimes forget about! And it's been uh, about eight months? since the last update. And the year has changed numbers.
Hmmm.
Then again, I shouldn't be surprised. I post to Facebook about once a year, and I have spurts of activity on every other social media site in between many months of silence.
Well, knowing me, I'm not going to make any guarantees as to how often this will update, but when I am inclined to, I'll talk here about my life and how my (way too many) projects are doing.
So what's new?
Life Updates
Work and stuff
I still live in Seattle and work at Oculus. I figure I'd remember to say something if that changed, but I don't see that changing for at least another year (I hope?).
Keyboards
I mentioned last time that I got into keyboards. As it turns out, I got really into keyboards. I've built three now, and I've started building some for friends as well.
This one's my latest project, and is a bluetooth keyboard (ignore the weird keycaps - I touch type, so I didn't really care what I put on it.)
I also did all the wiring myself, which I do not recommend:
...things got kind of messy.
I'm in the middle of drafting up a build log / postmortem of this board, if you're curious about the process. I'll post that up when it's done!
Theatre
So I got hilariously, ridiculously into Sailor Moon over the summer, and with that, I watched a tad too many of the Sailor Moon musicals (there are a lot of them!).
And I decided I loved them, and I loved musicals, and because of who I am as a person I wanted to learn more about how they were made.
I haven't gotten too far on that yet - it's one more interest in my loooong list of interests, but I was planning on getting more involved in Seattle's theatre community, and possibly auditioning in the future. But I've already begun putting feelers out and doing some research, so I'm excited to see where this goes.
Games
…I'd like to think that I still make games.
Actually, I do - the problem is that I try to make too many projects at the same time. I'm now working on like 5 games, which makes it kinda hard to talk about them. This might have something to do with why I haven't been as active on updates. Some of them I've at least mentioned before, so I'll talk about those.
Farsider
The big one, the game that has been on every email thus far. Unfortunately, I don't have good news for it.
It's been on hold for a little bit now, and probably will be for the foreseeable future. There are two reasons:
- I'd been wracking my brains over how to generate the levels for it, and gone through a lot of different procedural algorithms and methods, without finding one I was satisfied with. I was a bit worn out by the process, so decided to table it until I got a little more experience / instinct on what I wanted.
- During this time, Game Maker had a big update with its surfaces that broke literally everything I wrote.
Anyway, I can't even get it to build anymore, let alone run it, and the error messages are vague enough that I think I'd spend days chasing them all down. So I'm not that motivated to work on it right now.
I don't think I could put it away forever, though. I still sometimes have ideas that I put into a notebook, and I did write an entire script for this. But maybe after I finish another project first.
K (Title TBD)
The long prose project. Last time, I said I would work on it in June. Which I did – this was my main project between June and October.
I also mentioned that I didn't know how I wanted it to be published: I originally wrote it as a novel, but I have learned after working on it extensively that I didn't want it to be a novel.
I'm currently in the process of turning it into a strange interactive fiction game. The writing is almost entirely done (barring a few edits I still want to make), but I haven't done much coding yet, so I'll talk more about the system at a later date.
Recording the Predestined Time
The visual novel.
This one is actually almost done! I've been polishing it up sporadically, and all that's really left to finish up are the menus and the game icon.
It's a science fiction(?), slice-of-life(??) story about a tiny town and a handful of the people living in it, as they await the predestined time.
It'll be playable on Windows and Mac OS, and hopefully on Linux as well. I'm hoping to release it in February.
There's more game things in the near future as well: I'm probably going to participate in Global Game Jam (at the end of the month), and I'm looking to polish up another game for March.
Everything Else
I want to say 'that's it', but it's been 8 months, this is really not all. I did a lot and was very bad at tracking it all or telling people about it last year, and so one of my goals for the next year is to be a little better at that.
I'm not yet sure what that will look like. I was contemplating doing something like Hundred Rabbits's Devine and having a public task tracker, as well as a list of all projects since there are so many of them. But that means building that system, which is another project. Unless there's one available already?
I also got a copy of Microsoft Project, which I've been using to do some actual project management. It auto-schedules tasks based on estimates you give it, and it's been kind of sobering looking at the estimates for how long it'd be before I can release another game after Recording.
Doodlin'
I did Inktober in October and drew a bunch of environments! I didn't finish all 31, but it was enough that I'm impressed with myself anyway. Here are a few of my personal favorites.