Time

These past few months have been interesting, to say the very least. Not so much in terms of game development, no, that’s become more or less a constant. It’s almost like I’ve reached a plateau with the skills, & although there’s still a strong level of interest & drive to succeed the attention’s been diverted.

I’ve been sleeping & working when I feel like it, & that’s been working out very well. There are many schools of thought on effective time management & useful scheduling. When you’re employed it’s all done for you based on templates that’ve been around for ages. Someone decided that 8-hour shifts were productive. Starting at 9 AM & finishing around 5 PM was useful for living a happy life.

It’s probably bullshit, but a lot of folks stick with it because if they don’t they’ll lose their jobs.

Fortunately I’m in a position to eschew all of that tradition & try new ways of working. As a creative one of the first things you realize when “taken off the chain” is that you’re not always capable of producing on demand. Inspiration comes in waves, & isn’t always backed up by the motivation to express your impressions. Impression & expression often intersect at inconvenient moments, like in the middle of a hot shower or mid-afternoon siesta. Those moments need to be seized, the creative tools at the ready.

It’s no wonder so many creatives are unhappy & driven to depression or worse in structured environments.

So I’ve been doing things when I feel like it, trying to determine if I’m acting the genius or playing the lazy oaf. The jury’s still out, but as work seems to be getting done I’m not going to dissect the results until it really feels like there’s failure in the brew.

Daresults

PRISMA‘s sounds scored 16th out of 1610 entries in the Ludum Dare 48 no.26. Top 1% for rushed audio? I’ll take that.

The “overall” category seems some bullshit to me, but it’s more likely the fault of whatever arcane algorithms they’re using to compute the results. Entries that’s I’m certain only received a handful of ratings end up with higher “overalls” than those picked apart by hundreds of entrants.

It’s occurred to me that the best solution to any gripes with the process would come from establishing a new competition altogether. Too bad my interest level in putting something like that together is nil, so I’ll struggle along & keep holding out the belief that eventually I’ll produce something that will win the Ludum Dare. Or I won’t. Whatever.

Re-Tale

The re-release of Tale of the Madeus should be on sale from the Acre around the start of June. I’m super-happy with this 3rd revision of my first novella, & while it’s by no means a perfect work of fiction it tells the story I wanted to tell. The latest edit brought it down to around 26K words, 1K short of official novella status but it’s not like that distinction matters any more.

I’m looking into re-releasing Ambia for July or August. It’s going to take at least twice as long to do a revision of that text as it did with Madeus, but it will be good to have unification in the format & lore of the Solarus Cycle.

Golfishing

Something’s happening as part of the Fishing Jam. Still not certain what that is, exactly, but there’s some documentation on the official forums & a playable build.

This also covers the #1GAM entry for May. Convenient, that.

X1

I watched the full Xbox One reveal presentation & had some unpopular thoughts.

Again, whatever.

Random & Etc.

Solo independent development is a juggling act, & one that’s perhaps more tiring than most creative endeavors. You’ve got to balance the time & money spent on skills improvement, self-promotion, keeping up with the industry movements, & actually producing new work.

Maybe if the whole thing wasn’t so toxic it would be better. The act of sitting at a machine & staring into a monitor is something that’s got nothing good to offer the physical self, & the whole gamer/game-maker dichotomy is a nightmare to absorb mentally, but these are trials we have to subject ourselves to in order to be as well-rounded as possible.

Thankfully it’s the most fun I’ve had in my 38 years. Well, aside from those years spent high & debauched, but we don’t really remember that time very well anymore.

See you in 30.

The only thing more important than finishing & shipping—yes, those are one thing—a Ludum Dare 48 compo entry is then rating the hard work of all the other clinically insane brave competitors. Well aside from eating, drinking, & sleeping but that should go without saying. Shouldn’t it?

In the earlier days of LD48 this was a relatively easy task to accomplish, even for the competitor with a day job. A couple hundred entries could be leisurely played over the course of the allotted two weeks.

Then somewhere along the line LD48 became more mainstream—this said without a hint of hip irony, I mean come on, it’s the truth—attracting larger numbers of participants each time.

The most recent event saw some 2,347 (supposedly) playable video & analog games submitted for peer evaluation.

Competitors are given 3 full weeks to play then rate each entry, & leave a comment if they’re feeling egotistical/snarky/fancy. I tend to leave a lot of fancy, ego-driven snark. It shows I care.

So 3 weeks. That’s 30,240 minutes. Assuming you do nothing but play & rate entries that allows just under 12 minutes for each one.

The key question then becomes how much time should you allot for playing vs. offering stars & design advice? It takes me about 8 minutes to complete my own entry, & I know exactly how to complete it. I imagine it could take some folks upwards of 30 minutes to finish. If their goal is to be completely, magnanimously fair with the ratings process they wouldn’t even have time to finish & would be forced to offer a rating based on an experience not wholly experienced! Not that there’s anything wrong with that, game journalists & forum commenters do it all the time but that’s beside the point.

A person is then forced to make certain compromises if they want to go sifting through the entries for the gems. There are gems in there, trust me, but unless you just want to sit back & wait for others to find them, not bother rating—which ends up reflecting poorly on your own entry—, & shun the process entirely you need some form of filter.

This was my 8th Ludum Dare 48 in a row. I’ve gone from rating all of them to not giving a damn & then realizing I have to give a damn if I’m to get rated myself, so I’ve run the gamut.

I’ve crafted a handy spreadsheet of my evaluation process, suitable for framing.

It’s a “do unto others” sort of framework, & I’m horribly selfishly biased because I’m capable of producing web builds. But I’ve stomped my way down that route only because I kinda wanna get as many people as possible to play my game. If I was just in it to show off I’d just pull a SOS.

Rate early, rate often. Rate with purpose.

LUDUM DAREST

That’s 8 in the can. 8 times I’ve answered the call, 8 times I’ve delivered a working videogame in under 48 hours.

This is the first time I’ve finaled with time to spare. The game proper was done roughly 3 hours before the deadline, then another 2 hours spent on spit-polishing before submitting.

Play PRISMA, if you wish. Rate it, if you’re in the compo, & if you want a priority rating back leave a comment. Even just a “nice effort” would suffice.

The official project page is sparse this time, for reasons explained therein. I’ll paste this out from it as it neatly summarizes:

To me the Ludum Dare 48 compo has always been a sort of mid-term exam in a never-ending course on game development. It was one of the first public jam events I participated in when I first went independent back in September of ’10, & now with 8 in a row under my belt there’s a lot of positive retrospection to be had.

LD48 no.19 was nothing but sweat & stress. LD48 no.26 was a calm & considered process that left room for polish & testing. The improvement is palpable, & with each passing one—in addition to the terrifying amount of entries indicating the depressing growing number of developers out there—I find myself wondering why I haven’t buckled down & started to make real money with this craft.

So that’s that, then. I’ve further submitted this as this month’s entry for the #1GAM, ensuring that I have something for the first third of the year.

Thanks for reading & if you participated in the Ludum Dare 48 I hope you succeeded & didn’t bitch about the theme.

Because no one likes a bitch.