Down Time

So I just got back from a vacation, and due to the timing of that vacation I’m taking two weeks off from the blog despite it being a week-long vacation. It feels fine. I’m glad to have the opportunity to step back and think a bit more about what I’m doing.

What am I doing?

The blog will continue chugging away at its leisurely one-short-piece-a-week schedule for the foreseeable future. However, I’m starting to feel that I really need to develop this pursuit – essentially, because of pressures both financial and creative, I’m getting less and less comfortable just doing the same thing week after week. I’d like to, perhaps, start creating video pieces along the same lines as what I’m writing here, but I haven’t quite yet figured out how that all will fit together. Or, maybe, I could expand what I’ve already written, augment it with more examples and connective material, and try to turn it into a book. Or maybe it would be better to choose one piece, really flesh it out, and try to turn it into an hour long talk that I could give at any conference that would host me. Maybe, maybe, maybe: I haven’t quite figured out what to do, yet, but the upshot is that I want to take the work I’ve done here, that I continue to do, and expand it, make it bigger and realer and louder – and, perhaps, if I’m lucky, more profitable.

The ‘Lets Plays’ I’ve been doing on my youtube channel will probably stop, at least for now. There’s not much of an audience for the game I’ve been playing and it’s been really difficult to maintain productivity on EverEnding and other stuff while recording an hour a day (and spending another hour watching what I recorded). However, I’ll be building a new PC soon, and that should allow me to stream play/stream some other stuff I’ve been wanting to – without naming names, let’s just say it rhymes with “bark poles spree”. While I work on that, I may stream some other stuff: I’ll post about it on twitter before I do, though, so if you’re interested just follow me there.

I’m also planning on developing a side-game concurrent with EverEnding. Even though attempts to do similar things in the past have been low-key disasters, I’m fairly confident in being able to do this if I approach it properly. My first step will be, over the next few days, coming up with a plan to tackle this project – in essence a design document delineating the full scope of the project, but with most of the focus on how everything will fit together technically. From there I make a prototype, and from the prototype I develop the game. I’ll talk more about the specifics of that project once I get further in on it – in the meanwhile I’ll continue chugging away at EverEnding animation and tileset work.

So, sorry about taking a couple of weeks off with no real warning. I held out hope for writing an update while I was on the train, which of course turned out to be completely infeasible because I was mostly just really sleepy on the train. I’ll try to be more realistic in my expectations of myself in the future.

If you’d like to read some interesting things in this time when I am temporarily waylaid from writing interesting things, you might consider checking out my friend’s blog at http://strangenewwords.wordpress.com/ . There’s not as much of a theme going, but he’s far more scrupulous about frequent updates than I am, so check it out if you’re interested in spy thriller re-interpretations of erotic visual novels, critical analyses of tv adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries, or meditations on who and what The Devil really is. Also: Cat pictures when his time or energy prove insufficient to produce a piece of cogent writing.