Habits are helpful. Habit is a place to nail down the flapping edges of your behavior, to train consistency in yourself. But as with all points of stability, every habit rests on something else, and those things can be shaken loose. A home, a person, a job, any one of these may seem rock-solid only to roll away, and that’s when habits tend to slip. I’ve been letting habits I’m really quite fond of slip mostly from being distracted, by projects, novelties, and significant life changes both good and bad. I haven’t been writing blog posts – I’m going to be trying to do better on that score, since I think it’s good for my brain to get those thoughts out there and these posts are also the most consistent creative work I’ve produced in my life.
But okay, what about last month’s monthly project? By which I mean the month before last’s monthly project, which then expanded to become a 2-month project? It has, I guess, now further expanded to become a ?-month project.
I should probably talk a bit about what the project is before talking about how it went/is going. I decided going in that it was going to be a 2d platformer, and that for the first time I was going to seek out collaborators instead of trying to go it alone. With input from other people interested in the project it shifted into a 2d stealth platformer with some environmental interaction – think of, perhaps, a cross between the N series of games and Spelunky. Many of these elements are still, ah, a little rough around the edges, but I think the idea still has a lot of merit.
It was and is going well, but I got kind of burned out working on it — part of the idea behind these one-month projects in the first place was that they would be projects I could work full-force on and then complete and put down right around the time my enthusiasm might start to wane. This is the first such project I’ve tried to work with other people on, and I wasn’t prepared either for how that would affect this dynamic or for how busy I would be during that time period. Everyone has their own way of working, and on a freeware-type project like this everyone has a dramatically different scope of time they can bring to bear on the work.
So, right now, I don’t see any reason to rush this project to completion. I’ll be taking the next month or two to work on other monthly projects, while picking away at the most urgent tasks on the platformer as they become necessary, and then revisit the project in a couple of months to try to wrap things up.
In the meanwhile, for this month’s project I’m going to work on creating a vector drawing tool for Unity. This is something I came up against while I was building the lighting system for the 2d platformer project: Unity has very few tools for vector drawing, and those that exist are either no longer supported or aren’t very good yet. I’d like to take this opportunity to try to create a tool for creating vector graphics based off of the Flash graphics class. I’m not sure how far I want to take that approach, how full-featured it will be or what other capabilities it will encompass, but I at least have Flash (and OpenFL, the open source Flash-inspired game dev tool) to refer to for ideas and inspiration. Next month I’ll probably return to EverEnding… sort of! I’m going to try to basically port all the work I’ve done on the project into Unity and see if I can effectively use that to streamline and improve the quality of the work. It’s mostly a feasibility study/experiment. Either way, hopefully having this vector tool available will help in that process as well!