#17: Thus Spoke Zorathustra
“You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: How could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?”
Project update
My grant applications for June/July are getting reasonably close to finished now, with the budget only waiting to be substantiated by written quotes and agreements which I plan to send out within the next fortnight. That means in-principle agreements for character art (2D and 3D), environmental art (2D and 3D), quality assurance, sound engineering, recording facilities, voice acting and composition.
Just today, I met with one of the Arts ACT grants team (yay!) and got an opportunity to run my questions by them, which was fantastic. It cleared up a couple of general questions I had, but more than anything, after talking about the process and my questions at large, I feel very confident that my application is going to be as good as it can be by June or July. It’s going to be a really strong application, and some of the pressure that I’ve been feeling to keep pushing and pushing has reduced a touch, because I can very clearly see the finish to the process now. What’s better than that is that I think I will even have the time to do some of my nice-to-have activities (which I’ll share with you all as and when that happens!).
I’ve been drafting a day-by-day project plan for the 6-month period of the prototype, on the basis of a 2.5 day work week. That might seem granular, but it helps enormously to map out the order in which activities have to happen, to highlight when expenditure is going to occur, to perform a sanity check as to whether there’s enough time for me to achieve a milestone, or whether I’ve got reasonable expectations about the output or expectations on others. I’m acutely aware, after working and studying for about 2.5 days each for the last 14 months, how shockingly quickly days become weeks and weeks become months. Is it crucial that the things I have planned happen every single day? Not really. Is it crucial to know where the pain points, crunch periods and immovable deadlines are? Unquestionably yes. Patterns emerge naturally, as well. For example, it quickly becomes apparent that the half-day each week is going to become project management day where periodic communications need to happen, like touching base with my artists and composer, from which it just falls out that the other days wil be my focus days. It becomes possible to perform reasonableness checks at a gross level, stepping back and saying “is 2 days a week for 3 weeks really enoiugh time to perform X?” and “what happens if I fail here? what’s the consequence if I put A before B, versus after it?”
All of this is to say that I am on the cusp of having:
my budget strongly supported by tentative written agreements.
a milestone and deliverable plan for the life of the grant.
a plan supported by individual activities that seem reasonable.
a team of experts who I trust implicitly.
proof that I have reasonable expectations of what I’m asking of the team.
an index of rationales for why I’ve scoped each part of hte project in our out of a prototype.
… finished grant proposals!
You might notice above that I didn’t mention anything about the actual selection criteria. That’s because I’m taking is as given, if you’ve looked at this website or spoken with me personally, that I intuitively know the mission, vision and purpose of this project. You don’t need me to tell you yet again that I’m clear on the value of this project, not just to me, or Canberra, or Australia, the videogame industry, to the body of narrative storytelling, or to the trans community that I am a member of. I have a handle on that, never fear.
Personal reflections - Mistakes
Last week I accidentally consigned a completed blog post to oblivion by overwriting it due to my own carelessness (and it was nothing like a duplicate of this one). That’s a pretty small thing really, but it triggered something like a cascade of thoughts in my brain. I was very understanding of my mistake, I understood how it happened, why, how to avoid it in the future, and that it was small potatoes. At the same time, I was furious with myself because despite understanding it from all angles, I still made the mistake. It offered a chance to reflect on a similar sentiment expressed eloquently by Jean-Luc Picard, as written by David Kemper, in Star Trek season 2, episode 21 ‘Peak Performance’ (yes, I did look up the writer because I didn’t want to attribute the quote to Patrick Stewart), which goes:
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.”
This is such an important reflection that it bears repeating no matter how many times one feels like it. In my case, I did make a mistake, but what it brought out is that an identical result could easily have come about even if I made no mistake. For example, my website host might have been hacked, or crashed, or my PC might have exploded and corrupted the post, or any number of other things outside my control. There is so much wrapped up in our day-to-day performance of life, work, relationships, career, or any metric you want to select, that even a momentary falter can breathe life into a whole apparatus of self-criticism which (if you’re lucky) lies dormant most of the time, like sneaking over the tail of a sleeping dragon and having them wake up anyway.
Why bring this up? Good question. I think my reflection is that there is a certain serenity in acknowledging that we are not a source of infinite power and control, and that we will face adverse conditions in life regardless of how well we prepare for them. This is important and poignant to me because I am a person who likes to be prepared, and faces occasional anxety when I fall into the infinite regress that is dwelling on the sensation that I might have inappropriately prioritised. Nevertheless, it will eventually continue to happen from time to time that I do just that, despite my best efforts, and my reaction to my mistakes is of significance both to me and also those around me. I think we can all take a moment to reflect on that.
Games I played
You guys, it turns out I am terrible at keeping my promise to myself to prioritise relaxing and playing games, even for research purposes. At this point I think I have to resign myself to the fact that I am really only going to get time to get back to playing games once these applications are signed, sealed and delivered.
Extracurricular game dev update
I’m pretty stoked with where my little first-person shooter project has arrived at. The shooter aspect isn’t really the point, as I’ve been using the project as a testbed for all sorts of concept implementations:
Character controller inputs
Materials
Animation
Artificial intelligence using Unreal Engine’s native tools
Game levels, game modes, game instances (for anyone who has worked in Unreal before)
User interfaces
Save games
Post-processing
Audio
This project has been a huge amount of fun more than anything, and I’m just waiting on some feedback for it right now. I intend to incorporate that feedback before I share it, but hopefully that will be in the next fortnight. I’m keen to see what others think of it.
Textbook learnings
No textbookery this week due to other busyness, but I am more or less now finished with the textbook that talks through construction of a first-person shooter, and I’m keen to move on to something that is more relevant to my interests, even for conceptual purposes.
As always, sending out love and kindness to the world, and that includes you. Yes, you!
