#14: A Milestone Down The Road
“I ask you, if you understand that death is nothing to be feared, then I ask “what is blocking you from acknowledging this?” and you say “It gives me the heebie-jeebies, and the horrors”, then to this I say, alright, then death is not the problem, the heebie-jeebies are the problem.”
Project update
If you follow me on social media, you will already know that I have formally acquitted my script-writing grant, having now disclosed the outcomes to Arts ACT. I’m going to repeat those outcomes here, because I have a feeling of peace and calm over me which I think I will let linger for a week or so before throwing myself back into continuing that same work.
I achieved my aim of creating the story for the game, and significantly achieved my aim of writing the dialogue for the script. Noting that the story is what happens, and the dialogue is the detail of how the story unfolds, these are two separate tasks. For this activity I created 3 principal documents:
Artistic Direction Document (the guiding principles);
Story Summary Document (the entire story, abridged);
Draft Script (literal dialogue in screenplay format).
The Story Summary Document was the principal document for workshopping with Ylaria, as it communicates the whole story through bullet-points. Even abridged, the Summary is 19,000 words over 41 pages, which indicates the size of the story and the work created. The Draft Script is the first draft of character dialogue in Act 1. The script for Act 1 contains 19 scenes, exceeds 41,000 words, and due to the use of industry-standard screenplay formatting, exceeds 270 pages.
I do feel a bit sheepish that I didn’t finish the entire script, but I now have the knowledge that planning to create a story and then write a script for it in something like a month is a very ambitious task. Then again, sometimes you have to just attempt something before you’ve learnt that you couldn’t do it, and that will get you most of the way there. If I knew this was impossible to do in the timeframe from the start, I might never have applied.
I’m really pleased at how far I’ve come, and I’m comforted about how much of the task is now “done” (noting that the first draft has not been reviewed yet). Assuming that Acts 2 and 3 are the same size as Act 1, a vast amount of work remains to be done, but I have the motivation to see it through, and confidence in my ability to pull it off.
Last week I wrote that I had found a new grant to apply for, the Emerging Gamemakers Fund grant at Screen Australia, which just one week later I have decided I must postpone until the next round, in July. You might be tempted to think this is because the timeframe was too compressed - how could someone make a competitive grant application in only 3 weeks? This is partially true, but what actually happened was that I contacted Screen Australia, who said that my grant would be more competitive if submitted in July, because the July grant round is much closer to the start date of when I want to create my prototype (in January 2025). If I apply in April this year, there is a delay between the outcome of the grant application and the start of the work, which doesn’t make the application ineligible, but does make it a comparatively lower priority than other projects which are due to start immediately. I agree with that wisdom and don’t mind the spare time until then, to refine and polish my 3 planned applications in total.
Personal reflections - Busyness
There is some workaholic part of me which suspects that one of the reasons I threw myself at a new grant application last week (you can read about that here) was just to keep the momentum up, to keep me living in the moment and continuing to progress the project. Now that I have some breathing room between now and June/July to finish writing the remainder of my story, work on my study, and get back to my extracurricular activities… I do feel a bit of my momentum is slowing down. Not much, but noticeable. I would feel worried about that, but these days, I see that as healthy. Life is both highs and lows, rapids and calm waters, and I simply have to go with the current, not fight against it, because just as in real water, fighting the current of my own mind will lead to exhaustion just the same, until I can no longer resist the motion and am carried along regardless.
In that spirit, I will have a quiet week this week, and I suspect that the tides of motivation will return to me soon, and I shall be revitalised enough to leap in and splash about. I look forward to telling you about it. I used my Easter Monday to complete a significant body of work for my programming study, related to rendering 3D objects and illuminating them with custom lighting systems. I’ve put below a video and two still frames of a 3D object I was supplied with, which I’ve lit up with 3 light sources in a 3D scene (a green light, a red light, and a rotating white light imitating the sun).
This is part of the first assessment for my "“computer graphics” class, and it’s taken around a month to build.
“Soul Spear” 3D lighting demo with 3 lightsources.
Games I played
Last week I played boardgames! Friends of mine were in town for pre-wedding celebrations, and we played several entertaining rounds of Cosmic Encounter, an infinitely replayable board game about your respective alien races trying to control the galaxy. Each player is a different race from the others, and each alien race has a unique ability separate from the other players which changes the course of the game. These interact with one another, and with the game’s rules, to produce entertaining and sometimes run-away effects. I would highly recommend it, and the game has numerous expansions which each increase the complexity or difficulty (depending how you view such things).
Extracurricular game dev update
I hope to get back to my online indie game developer course this week or next, as it’s been on hold for a month or so due to my grant writing.
Textbook learnings
Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine 5
I’ve resumed a textbook on game development in Unreal (the engine which I would like to develop my game in) and I am endlessly surprised at how simply they make creating things. At first, every time I see something unfamiliar, I am momentarily baffled and worried, whether because of jargon and terminology, visual unfamiliarity, etc… But the moment I see how the unfamiliar thing works, it is clearly apparent that the way Unreal implements functionalities in game development makes me happy. It’s simply, clear and concise, and I come to realise what worried me is simply that I expected it to be more complex than it has to be.
There is a place in game development for building things “from scratch”. I have very little interest in this once I understand how the underpinnings work, and I simply want the most efficient way to do things. As a result of working for many years in an environment where reinventing the wheel is a costly waste of time, I really don’t much care for building things from scratch beyond obtaining an understanding for how things work. Some others may do this simply for the love of it - by all means, go forth and do what you love! This is a good thing for the world… But it just so happens that I do not find it to be of value or interest when things are made ‘from scratch’ when this was a costly thing to do, if alternatives are readily available.
Until next week, lovely people.
