#16: The Art of Simply Being
“I am a cage in search of a bird.”
Project update
We’re back to writing! Eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed I have been tardy with the blog this week. This is, paradoxically, because I have been on break from my study this week. Yes, that meant I had free time on Monday and Tuesday, but I spent it writing a couple of thousand words each day, and have otherwise been in a programming delirium with Unreal Engine. It’s been simply fabulous.
I’ve started drafting the website that I’m making specifically for my game. This was always my plan, as this website itself is simply for my personal branding, as separate from the game. One will link to the other, yes, but I’m really excited to unveil the (admittedly small and targeted) site for the game itself in either late May or early June, to coincide with my grant applications. Some sample business cards, mocked up in some of my colour palette choices, arrived last week. So exciting!!
I’m continuing to accumulate talented creative people on my list of project team members, and I am just so excited to share all of those specifics with you sometime in June. Why June? Because that’s when I cross my heart and sign my grant applications on the dotted line, meaning that I need to have aggregated not just all the work to be done, but who will be doing it. Before that moment, it’s all simply speculation. Plus, I’d like to do a big reveal that involves them all in some way. The team look like it will be 10 or 12 people at least, which is marvellous because I trust each of those people implicitly in their respective fields. If you’re one of them and reading this, thank you for being here for the journey!
Personal reflections - Self-pacing
The title of the blog this week is about the sensation that I have been feeling - that it is important to constantly strive for self-improvement, while acknowledging that a person’s capacity for self-improvement is constrained by their degree of ability for self-improvement prior to the self-improvement taking place. Circular reasoning, or a circular problem? It’s a matter of perspective, I suspect. In any case, I have been generous to myself when I needed it, such as not going to the gym last week because I wanted to do other things. Historically, I’ve held myself to a high bar for performance that has kept me in a heightened state of stress. These days, by letting go of the expectation to perform, I’m finding it easier to do so, while also reducing my stress about my own pre-conceived ideas as to the importance of activities I feel I ought to do. Am I going to stop going to the gym? Absolutely not, but that’s because I enjoy going to the gym, not because I feel I ought to go.
I have had to take stock of how much time I spend in tunnel-vision. It’s quite often that I spend 6 hours in a day on one topic, and then another 6 on something else, for example writing and programming. Or, alternatively, 12 hours on a single thing. I have a great capacity for focus and concentration, and in this last week, I’ve had to take a step back and realise that sometimes, that is to my detriment. On two separate occasions it was 2am before I wrapped up working on this current piece of assessment for my programming class. I very rarely stay up late, and am committed to getting the right sleep balance, but I was simply so focused on finishing what I had started that I couldn’t put it down. To be clear, that wasn’t out of some pig-headed arrogance that I wouldn’t be beaten by the machines, but rather that it simply felt like what I wanted to do. I was having fun. How delightful!
Yes, enjoying myself is a delight, but then I looked around at my unwashed clothes, my unmade bed, my uncooked groceries, and the list goes on. Was I unproductive until 2am? Absolutely not, I have been making a project in Unreal that I shall soon share, and the skills which I have developed will be directly used in the creation of my own game next year; these are skills that I am building not to pass grades, but to build a game to change social opinions about transgender people. I can’t think of it in any other terms, and on those terms, not a second has been wasted.
However…
I am definitely going to need a cleaner and a cook, you guys. Hands up who wants to help me out. Nobody? No one? Alright, nevermind.
Games I played
You know the drill, unfortunately, my friends… Nary a whisper of a game this last week, despite being on leave. I’m sure I said something about doing that… It’s all starting to feel a bit circular, isn’t it?
Textbook learnings
Blueprints Visual Scripting for Unreal Engine 5
This book has been utterly fantastic. This textbook is about 50% attributed to building a first-person shooter, and 50% to additional skills. I’m not really interested in FPS as a game genre, except where that’s secondary to the story, such as is Cyberpunk 2077. With that said, in programming terms, almost everything about a first-person shooter is of value to every other genre, because the underlying skills and techniques in use are the same, simply applied to different ends.
For example, programming a user interface with buttons, colours, menus that control aspects of the game such as pausing, unpausing, moving a character around, interpolating between one animation and another - all that good stuff is virtually identical. Genre is the spice, the variety, the flavour, on an otherwise very similar meal.
This textbook is the basis of my current assignment for school, which is to create a user interface which will allow someone to interact with a 3D world in a meaningful way. For example, to do actions like changing the colour of objects, or make an animated character move about. I’ll tell you more about it when I record some video of my project and step through it.
Until next week my loves.
