Weather: Warm, muggy, and trying desperately to rain.
Wildlife: Two slugs *and* a bunny.
Cuts and/or scrapes: 2.5
I fear for that bunny. The slugs were huge. My fenders got a teeny workout - not because it did actually rain (it didn't), but because it was so humid that the runoff from late-night lawn sprinklers hadn't evaporated.
The main lobby of my studio features stone columns along the walls, which appear as if someone rough-cut a ton of quarter-inch slate and stacked the pieces on top of each other. A couple months ago I touched one with my hand and thought to myself that they could really injure someone who ran into them unawares. Tonight, reaching for my helmet in my bike pannier, I misjudged and instead ran knuckles-first into one of said columns. So now I've got two of those weird knuckle band-aids on my middle and ring fingers, and a smaller scrape on my pinkie. Thanks, stylish architecture!
Tonight's post title is brought to you by John Hammond, of course.
Ludum Dare, a large tri-annual game jam, is getting in gear again, and seeing its Twitter feed come to life reminded me that one of my hopes for this summer is that I would find/make time to do some independent game design work - whether that meant working on physical board/card games, learning a programming language or game engine, or something else along those lines. It hasn't really panned out so far; long work hours and a physically demanding commute kind of tire out my brain and don't leave me a lot of drive to buckle down for some C# or Unity. I feel like the essential starting point for indie development is a background in computer science, and unfortunately that's not something I've continued since my freshman year CS 101 course (16 years ago!). So there's a big wall to climb before I can even start, and that's pretty daunting.
I started this blog as an attempt to at least get my creativity moving again. Writing is still creating, even if it's just a play-by-play of my not-much-going-on life. It's something productive to do while I cool down after I get home, and now that I've actually shared the link with people it's also a "here's what's up" for my friends and family back on the east coast. Whatever it is, I think it's working -- I'm thinking again about games and narratives, looking back at the list of brief ideas I started coming up with earlier this year. A lot of them were simply dreams I remembered after waking - like jetpacking around the main strip of an amusement park, saving trapped park guests from a rampaging Tyrannosaurus. Or a game about baking... and breadcats.
Some of my dreams are less serious than others.
I'm still not sure what my best "move" is. On the one hand, I could start fiddling with tabletop game prototypes tomorrow - which is "game design" experience, but only in the conceptual sense. Alternately I can dig into a game engine or scripting language and gain some engineering experience, but at the expense of practicing actual game design. A solid piece of advice I read a while ago went something like this: any time you start working with a new game engine, the first game you should make is Pong. It makes a lot of sense if your goal is to learn the engine, but what if your goal is to learn to design your own game? "I made a Pong clone" just doesn't have the same effect on a resume.
To do:
- update said resume (only seven weeks left on my contract)
- some upper-body exercises
- investigate a local jeweler
- more laundry
- make some games.
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