Pre-Thanksgiving Status Update
Hi there!
It's been another few months since the last email, and as usual a lot has happened in my life, so it's a good time as any for an update. Also Thanksgiving is tomorrow, which -- what in the world happened to November?!
Life Updates
So last time you all heard from me was...July. Which means that I'm covering most of summer, and most of fall here. Hrmmm.
I mentioned in the July email that I'd joined a theater troupe and put on a play about Star Wars - and I'm happy to say that that was a lot of fun! Which has led me towards a dilemma: theater takes a lot of time. I barely got any game development done in the months of July and August with the rehearsing and the shows.
So...I'm not involved with anything theater-related at the moment. Theater will probably remain a summer-only thing for me, given that I tend to be unproductive with my personal projects during that time anyway -- and I liked theater enough to want to keep doing it.
I did go to GeekGirlCon a few weeks ago, though, and got to say hello to a few theater friends there, so that was really nice.
Inktober
I sort of did Inktober this year, where I drew a picture per day for my favorite anime (Revue Starlight), with one piece per episode. (The show only has 12 episodes though, so it didn't last the whole month.)
You can find them all here: https://revuetober.netlify.com/
Upcoming Events
I feel like this is a section that I need now, because I keep traveling all the time despite disliking travel.
From November 30th to December 4th I'll be in San Francisco.
From December 20th to January 5th I'll be back in NJ with my family for the holidays.
If any friends are around and want to meet up, please let me know!
Projects
Over the past few months, I've settled into mostly rotating through three main projects. Which is still a lot, but surprisingly I haven't had too many other diversions. I'm also actually giving myself deadlines now, so maybe I'll actually still be working on the same projects come the next email.
Desert Angels
After a long period of doing mostly games experiments, I finally have a game project that I'm committing to for the long haul, which is this one.
Desert Angels is going to be a walking simulator with guns that takes place in a mechanical scrapyard in the desert. You play as Gerel, a young woman from the nearby oasis village, who is going through the scrapyard in order to find a working generator so that she can power her village. Standing in your way is mountains of trash, which you can destroy using the explosive weapons scattered throughout the scrapyard. Or not -- because even though the trash is in your way, the trash is also where the stories are.
...I'm still working on the summary / pitch some, but that's where I've landed for now. I'm making this game in Unity, which means learning Unity, but progress has been going well I think. (Most of that dev time was spent creating shaders for the environment...)
I've been working on this since August, with the hope of getting something playable at the end of the year. Which is already true, because the camera works and you can move Gerel along with WASD. Next up is getting the weapons to work, and then the cutscenes!
(The end of year deadline is a soft one -- the real deadline is in May, since I'm hoping that the game will be complete enough by then to submit to the Seattle Indies Expo.)
Recital
Recital is the interactive fiction / visual novel engine I've been working on for a few months now. Actually, I think it's almost been a year, considering I started it at the beginning of this year.
The latest features I added were the ability to have variables and conditionals, allowing branching paths in the story. To test that, I implemented Cloak of Darkness in the Recital Engine. Cloak of Darkness is sort of like the 'Hello World' of interactive fiction, and is not exactly a groundbreaking story, but does show off how links work and branching paths. You can play the Recital version here: https://recital-cloak-of-darkness.netlify.com/
(also this means that there's now a distribution method for Recital games!)
There's technically a public version now, since I have the recital packages on npm. However, it's not technically ready since there's absolutely no documentation, and I haven't released the source yet [so it'd be very difficult to figure out how to use it]. Still, if you're really curious or daring, you can find Recital here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@recital/recital
K
K is a story that was originally supposed to be a novel before I decided to write Recital to convert it into a game. It's a story about three young women who venture into a canyon in order to reclaim a lost magic, and who are absolutely not prepared to go into a canyon. Drama happens. I don't have a pitch ready for this, or a title for that matter.
I last talked about it approximately a year ago...because I was spending all that time writing Recital.
But now Recital is actually starting to approach usable state, and it's time for me to look at the big huge project I wanted to put in it. Unfortunately, last time I looked at it the story was in pieces because I was in the middle of a big editing spree, and so I'll have to put it back together first.
Like with Desert Angels, I gave myself a deadline of End of Year -- in this case, to get the first chapter complete in Recital so I can demo it to people.
I've also been drawing pictures of the characters and environments to help me visualize things better. (As it turns out, I've found a neat workflow for creating 'prototypes' of environments using Unity before drawing them, which has been improving my background art significantly.)
Other Stuff
Announcements
I've come to realize that my very infrequent emails have caused me to end up with fairly overloaded updates, since in the months between I sometimes end up creating more than one thing.
As a result, I think I'll be experimenting some with sending emails when I have something new to announce (in addition to the more general purpose status updates, which will mostly cover incomplete work).
'Something to announce' in this case means that I made something that is now released, or that I have an upcoming event where I'll actively be looking to socialize (and thus may want responses from people on this list.) All such emails will have a tag somewhere in the subject heading, either [Release] or [Event] to distinguish them.
(The normal status update emails will continue to have 'normal' subject headings, though I don't remember if they are at all normal.)
I don't think I'll send too many of those emails because I don't make that many things in a year, but we'll see how it goes. Hopefully this makes things a little less confusing as to when I have actually made something that you can get!
Doodlin'
Now that I've been working more with backgrounds and perspectives I'm starting to actually be able to 'sense' when perspective in my drawings are really off.
(The shirt says '10 out of 10 humans were once baby')