If you missed it last year, I did a brief run-down on what I worked on during the fall semester last year. And now I'll do the same for the spring. Because spring starts late February. Right? (I'm only writing it now because I've now gotten home from skiing holiday and managed to gather my thoughts enough to figure out what the next semester will be about.)
First off, though, I want to address something a bit more important than the Spring: Pieces.
As
of the 17th of February, I've been doing this for a year. Every second
day, writing a completely new piece of fiction, poem, flash-whatever,
rambling something for an entire year. That’s pretty cool.
But, I think I should stop now. I’ve really enjoyed doing it. It’s been amazing, and my writing has improved immensely because of it. But, I think I’m partly done. I’ve, as you’ve perhaps noticed, uploaded fewer and fewer of them. And that’s partly because I’ve dedicated less time to polishing them up in an uploadable state and partly because I feel the quality has dropped a bit and partly because I feel less excited about it than I did in the beginning.
Now, that was bound to happen, but I still feel that this is primarily something I do for my own benefit and if I don’t get the same out of it I did before I should perhaps do something else.
I also know that enjoyment isn’t everything and I have only continued doing it because it was something I had to do. It hasn’t always been enjoyable to remind myself right before I went to bed that, fuck, right, I haven’t written today. But that’s always the game. And I know that. And I'm still immensely happy I've done it.
But I’m afraid that I won’t be able to continue another year doing the same thing. I feel I need a little bit of a break.
So, I think I’ll stop.
That doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing though! I think my next plan is to focus on slightly longer short story-type stuff instead, and maybe write one a month or something? Just as a draft. Will be good practice in that format, which I haven’t gotten a lot of, and it’ll possibly help me restrain “longer” stories into something manageable.
Hmm, I don’t know, maybe that’s extreme. Maybe I'll still do a piece once a week or something, so I don't forget how to do it. Maybe I'll go back through the archive and polish up some of the promising but flawed pieces and put them up here. I’ll figure something out. Stay tuned!
ANYWAYS, with that out of the way, I have some projects I want to talk about, because I’m going to be working on exciting stuff this semester.
THINQ
If you read the last one of these, you’ll recognize that name. It’s the big game production I’m working on alongside (and in collaboration with) my studies. And this semester is going to be supremely cool! Last one was sort of a wild experimentation phase that, while it was super useful in understanding the power of the game, ultimately led to nothing that was really playable. So we’re rectifying that this time by having the goal of creating a demo-stage of one of the zones in the game. This’ll roughly be around 1/8 of the full game but I think it’s going to be great fun. And I’ve thus far spent most of my time reading up on mythology, so I’m having a blast. (Just read the bio on this god. That thing's scary.)
Surveillance, Narrative and Gameplay Exploration
My other main project this Spring is a game idea I’ve toyed with loosely in my mind for a little while until it really clicked with me around two weeks ago. And luckily I have two courses on my semester that I can neatly tie into making this game and doing the appropriate research.
I won’t say much about what the game is about now, but the general theme is surveillance, and I want to create something inspired by Papers, Please and Her Story. For this Spring, it’ll undoubtedly be smaller in scope, but I think it’ll be really fun to work on.
Book Revisions
Last time I wrote about waiting for beta readers. That's (mostly) over now. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback and I’m currently reading through the book myself on paper, to get a better idea of what I feel about it. When that's done I'll start revising it to a more finished state.
So that will take up most of my remaining time this semester, I think. My plan is to finish this book this year, and I have a bunch of work ahead of me before that’ll happen, so wish me luck
Eravola?
Yeah. I also wanted to do that. And I still really do. But I’m not sure I’ll have the time to focus on that this semester with the other things going on. Maybe I shouldn’t be creating a brand new game with that one partly underway, but I think I’d rather focus my other idea right now, so Eravola’ll have to wait. Maybe if I get time in between I’ll look at it again, or I’l turn it into a summer project instead.
That's it! I think that'll be enough to keep me busy for a couple of months.
(Image Source: http://deathtothestockphoto.com/)