My weekly update is a day late.
I think my Champions Online vacation has about come to an end. My alt-a-holicism has settled on a nice power armor wearing gadgeteer who is neatly trivializing content as only a nanite infused fletchette chaingun wielder with robotic backup can. I'll probably take him all the way to 40 (the cap in that game). At that point, I'll put the game on the back burner for a bit and allow the developer a few weeks/months to shore up bugs, balance, and content issues in the game. I did buy a discounted 6 month subscription, MMORPGs always improve, so putting up my feet and waiting is actually a pretty good plan here.
I need to knuckle down on my educational commitment some more. When you get right down to it, it's not all that hard to do for a fellow with unemployed timetable, and therein lay the problem: I have a subconscious conviction that I can put them off indefinitely. Truth of the matter is, I need to study now and then I'll have plenty of time to relax afterward.
It's interesting how cyclical human progress can be. Relent for a moment, and you're back into old habits. Grounding this point home, the scale (that bastard) is telling me I'm back up to 235 lbs. Focus, and you head in the right direction... looks like I need to start counting calories again.
I'm looking at my BYOND game I was working on before and wondering if perhaps I had been bearing down on it so hard that my head wormed itself up into my rear end.
Right now, I have a hive of sorts. It grows in a very convincing ant-like manner. Resources are moved back and forth. However, it's no game - it's more of an artificial intelligent experiment. It was a relatively successful one - yes, in fact, a hive of NPCs do behave fairly well as game pieces - but it's still no game.
I lost perspective. A good online environment is about letting things happen. I was trying to let only the right things happen. No game came about because the parameters were too stringent to allow player choice to really enter the picture.
I don't think it impossible to shoehorn a microcosm like this into an interesting game -- no, there's quite a few ways to do so, in fact -- but clearly this needs to be my primary focus now. It may well be worth starting over from scratch, richer from the practice of the thing if nothing else.
Right on - sounds like a plan.
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Geldonyetich wrote:
Right on - sounds like a plan. Yeah but, I'll never stick to it. My plans always go wrong when I ask myself "why am I saving the boring shit for later? I wont work on it then 'cause it's boring" and the loop continues. >.> | |
Yeah but, I'll never stick to it. My plans always go wrong when I ask myself "why am I saving the boring shit for later? I wont work on it then 'cause it's boring" and the loop continues. >.> I'd have to check it again, but I'm pretty sure a book on motivation I read would probably suggest trying to mentally frame it as something other than boring and that "my plans always go wrong" is negative self-talk that helps assure they will. Not that I'm a poster child for stunning motivation myself, of course. ;P | |
Well, I think the fact everyone on my team (Mobius Evalon, Nadrew, Audeuro and Mikau) is supporting the idea and willing to lend assistance on the website helps in maintaining motivation. The boring shit I'm still avoiding, but I've started to dive into .htaccess and better link/URL handling. So I'm adding a necessary learning experience into the boring mundane crap, which is making it slightly more interesting.
I reduced my index.php to: <? include('includes/header.php'); include('pages/' . $page . '.php'); include('includes/footer.php'); ?> And I'm stoked. | |
Actually, come to think of it. My new project is right up your ally. Would you have any objections if I contacted you in the new few days as it gets closer to a working model?
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I appreciate the offer but, at this moment, I've yet to be successful in making room for the things I already need to do.
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I haven't had a drink for 5.5 days which approaches a life time achievement award for me... and I've been crawling into bed at 9ish... and still... I haven't been to sleep before 2am. Even if I try this hard... a normal sleep pattern continues to evade me. Ever scream at yourself in your head to shut the hell up? heh.
As far as staying positive on a long term project goes. I think physiologically, being organized and knowing exactly what your future holds can lead to premature burn out. The more things you pile onto your future (V2, V3, V4) the heavier it weighs on you. I've taken the approach of a running todo list and it seems to be working out very well. It contains every idea I've had for a particular project. All my notes about the project live on the same document and push the TODO list down as I go. I try not to ever sort or organize the list except for when I need the next step. Usually, I think about what I need or want to do next and then I "scrub" my TODO list for all the things related to that thing. This is can be a pleasant exercise because you get to check off a bunch of stuff you already did and dig out a bunch of ideas. I put them all at the top of my TODO list and leave the rest unsorted (a mystery). I've also been trying to only think of the problem at hand and once I have the next steps in my head or TODO'd, I force myself to stop thinking of that project. I just started this actually. I have an hour commute each way so you guys can probably guess at the types of things spinning through my head during that time frame. It's easy to burn yourself out if you think and work on the same problem space for too long. The project I'm working on now isn't even a game but a tool to support game design. The fact that it's far more "work work" than creating a game is sort of my "motivation monster" right now. :) My latest thoughts are revolved around the "WOW" in entertainment and how shallow and temporary it is the more I think about it. Potentially an interesting question to chew on... What's something that continues to "wow" people over the years? We recently sent some stuff to the moon. It's no longer "wow" level stuff but simply "oh" factor which kinda sucks. I'm thinking we need to develop a drug that resets the wow factor in people. :) ts | |
It also seems to affect the way I target my projects. With exercise, decent eating and a good sleeping schedule, I make phenomenal progress on any project I'm doing. In my current dishevelled state, I make very little.
Working on a website I want to get started, I kept finding myself burned out and giving up and because everything I make I end up hating, starting over and making the same progress (which oddly enough, leads one to make exceptionally modular fire-and-forget ajax methods to shave half the time off user registration, unfortunately, it can probably be done better and needs to be rethinked).
I've decided to attack that project on another angle. Simple layout (nearly identical to tiberath.com), screw user registrations, I'll pump the site full of content with myself, Mobius and Mikau and work on the painfully irritating things such as forums and user registration once I'm content with how things are going. Should be fun.