I wish the hundreds of abandoned projects I’ve got lying around dusty hard drives on my shelves were as inspired as theses.
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(Yeah, should be a VW bus.)
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Oh, I don’t know. Theses can be pretty uninspired.
It’s good to see that other people have this problem.
What’s worse though is when you’re simultaneously on an SSRI antidepressant which revs up your creativity, and an anti-seizure drug that immobilizes your motivation. Or maybe I’m just rationalizing fundamental sloth.
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I thought he died of rabbit starvation.
Regardless, I’d still play that game.
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There’s not likely to ever be any final answer, but there was a theory he was poisoning himself with wild potato seeds based on the symptoms he reported in his diary.
Since that article was published, besides ODAP, another potential problem compound in the same seeds, l-Canavanine was identified.
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The lean protein diet probably contributed.
In the wild, knowing which plants are safe, which are not, and which require a few steps to make them safe, can be a tricky business, even if you have fire and pots.
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Yeah, when it comes to interactive stuff, not having a full rough working version means there are a lot of unknowns about how much more work might be required, and the pace up until that point can be misleading because now you have to knuckle down and do the fine work - (re)balancing, redoing some existing content, fixing bugs, etc.
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Did you mean: Died Alone?
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I’m afraid to look in mine in case I see something like “Website to post one line messages, like we did on the HP2000. Nah, stupid idea!”
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[quote=“LearnedCoward, post:44, topic:98717”]I thought he died of rabbit starvation.[/quote]I have the distinct impression that every couple of years, this Krakauer fellow is going to pop up and say, “Hey everybody! Remember what I said before? Well, here’s how he really died!”
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I guess we are both in stuck one way or another.
I think game development would be fun, but making all the models, sounds, etc. seems like it would be a big undertaking. I’m more interested in the programming aspect, so I tend to stick to programs and tools.
If I had a way to program games without worrying about all the non programming aspects, I’d be really interested in it!
I guess there’s always ascii games like dwarf fortress! That game always amazes me.
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So this article (the sourced Kibuishi and Abel piece) seemed to be about being productive, about getting projects out into the world, and getting work done. It even ended with a button to get Abel’s one-step guide to being a better you (whose prompt is to first join her mailing list) I liked the core idea of just getting down to business with an idea before it turns into a giant load of expectations you can’t meet. The idea of just starting where you are, and letting your work evolve without being mired in perfectionism. I think about the first few Calvin and Hobbes strips, which had none of the ease and style of the later ones. I also think about the millions of beautiful and polished, stylish webcomics out there that, if you press that “<< first” button, you are shocked to see the beginnings of. I’ve gotten inspiration from that idea, for sure.
But I chafe at the idea that these huge, meandering, projects are some kind of “unborn”debt. I chafe at the idea that productivity and creativity are natural bedfellows. Full disclosure, I am a fearful person who craves predictability, so I don’t think I could handle the day to day of creative endeavors. At least as described by the creatives who have volatile and dynamic enough lives to have their biographies go viral (so maybe some selection bias is at work here…) But I say that to set up that maybe everything I’m saying here is an elaborately constructed bunch of sour grapes, glistening in the wine-country sun.
I live, as many others do, a workaday life, coupled with an immense and detailed and ever-growing fantasy life. I started dreaming up these stories in childhood to transport myself. Not from anything terrible, just from boredom and sleeplessness. Closing my eyes and filling in details, reworking plot junctures, replaying cut scenes is a very personal escape. Abel suggests that there is a paralysis in projects becoming so vivid in your mind that they would be impossible to actually perform or make whole for the world in a way that satisfies your vision. I agree. What I disagree with is whether this is an inherently bad thing. Putting a concept on paper is a compromise. It compromises the vision so that others can get pleasure from it, and so that you can get compensation and admiration from it. And perhaps, on a higher level, to grapple with it in a more concrete way, and turn it into something it couldn’t have become just swirling in your mind.
In any case, though, I find this disdainful attitude toward the “living in the mind” state of being to be reductive. Calling brain-stories “debt” is a stark and useful, but harsh framing. I get that it is a “productive attitude.” Abel, it looks like, is pivoting into a life as a motivational speaker, the creative entrepreneur’s version of Marie Kondo More power to her, and those benefiting from this advice, this will undoubtedly make a lot of people happy. But what –and I’m going to go full @popobawa4u here- is the prison exactly? The fact that the stories exist in your head? Or the compulsive and socially-reinforced (market-driven?) idea that if they remain insubstantial, ephemeral, un-realized, that that aren’t worth as much?
I’ve got a drawer full of folders, sectioned off into categories for drawings, comics, animation and video games. Each section has a “misc” folder where quarter-baked ideas go. A quarter-baked idea, when it gets to the half-baked phase gets a paperclip to hold its pages together within the “misc” folder, and then anything beyond half-baked gets its own folder. I started this system after listening to a talk by [insert name of famous author I totally should remember…Joan Didion? Blame the idea debt…] who said she loved having a bank of idea she draw from if she ever had the time or a book advance, she could just dive right in.
Over time, my filing cabinet has been a solace for me. Watching the folders grow feels like a thing in itself, a manifestation just physical enough to feel like I can measure some kind of production to satisfy the anxiety of non-production. But lately, realizing these stories and projects will never get an audience, I’ve started consciously trying to embrace the private, endless, ephemeral potential that they retain while living free from pen, ink and criticism. It started as a way to quiet the anxiety that would arise, as Abel described, when I was lying in bed, calculating the hours it would take, and all the training I would need to realize these concepts to anything close to my imaginings of them. It’s morphed somewhat, though into a study of the source of that anxiety, the source of that pressure to share these tales with the world, and make them concrete.
I’m not saying I’ve convinced myself, or that I’ve decided that this isn’t an elaborate excuse designed through expert mental masturbation. My mom did deliberately raise me to be happy with mediocrity, and never pushed me to achieve anything other than self-satisfaction, partly from her mental gymnastics to avoid her own disappointment at never having produced creative works that haunted her. I do think it’s worthwhile to explore the idea that the pressure to turn ideas into capital “W” Works that can be admired, criticized, purchased or rejected, and added to the cannon of human creativity isn’t necessarily intrinsic, and isn’t necessarily a straight line to happiness or fulfillment.
Just kidding you guys, I’ll let you know when my GoFundMe is up.
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Is there a list of the games you have completed, though?
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Most game development environments have free libraries of stock assets. Of course your textures and crates and thrones and whatnot will be immediately recognizable as free stuff to anyone familiar with that environment — Unity or GameMaker or what have you — and thus amateurish, but you can use them as placeholders until you’re far enough along to enlist an artist.
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Depending on how you want to develop, I can recommend a few different engines/SDKs:
LÖVE
https://love2d.org/
near bare-metal cross-platform Lua interpreter. Absolutely lovely to develop in if you have an internet connection to read the wiki. Shit out of luck if not.
gDevelop
http://compilgames.net/
If Stallman made a take on Game Maker, this would be it. Cross-platform, open source, mainly drag-and-drop code with a lot of power and easy management of art assets.
Actually, now that I think about it, Lua is near perfect. There are Lua interpeters on pretty much any device (OneLua on PSP had stunning 3d performance).
If you start a github repo for a project, fire me a PM. I’m not good at art, but I am persistent and will work at pieces until they are perfect. I know very little code (I can read code and mostly understand, but writing code is a different story).
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Holy shit, nice find. It’s a reply to that and to Hidden Agenda, which had a similar “limited number of meetings as the world hurtles on” mechanic
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Only a couple really qualify.
TinyHack
http://boingboing.net/rob/tinyhack/
Character Creation is The Whole Game
https://beschizza.github.io/charactercreationisthewholegame/
(And the latter is not really finished, lol)
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If I even knew the first thing about game creation, I’d have a crack at one of these. 
Strikes me that there could be scope for a group-BBS effort on some of them.
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