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Tag Archive for Writing

Through a glass

January 14, 2013 People Comments Off on Through a glass

It’s surprisingly easy to forget that, what you are seeing through the glass of your computer monitor, or smartphone, or tablet, is only one viewpoint.  It’s skewed viewpoint, inhabited by a broad range of people that, for one reason or another, have the time to put their thoughts, hopes, dreams, hurts and fears out into the ether where anyone can see them.  And that what lots of this stuff is.  People’s inside voices (even professional peoples, who are being paid to speak in this medium, are lured to say things they might not consider something to say aloud).

You are looking at the world through a distorted lens.

I’m not using distorted here as a negative.  There are Good Things to be viewed through this lens, just as there are Bad Things.  But it is human nature to focus on the Bad Things, those are often important things, the ones that can take you and your whole group of somewhat advanced primates out of the picture if you don”t LEARN from those bad things.  And because of the way linking and page ranks and all those nifty tools we use to drive traffic work, it’s very easy to drop down the rabbit hole.  To spend your entire day going from Bad Thing to Bad Thing (or Good Thing to Good Thing) so, by the time you shut down your screen for the evening, or morning, or whenever, those Things are going to color your day.

The point is, and it’s something I have to remind myself of, because I spend a lot of time in front of Screens, that it’s a tiny window onto the world, like trying to see the world only through the peekaboo in your front door.  In order to retain perspective, you have to look out through other windows as well.  It’s the difference between viewing a snapshot and a movie.  One shows you the overweight lady at Walmart, whose kid in the shopping cart has a plastic bag on their head, the other shows you the full 30 second sequence of the kid playing with the bag, putting it on their head, then the mother taking it away and putting it in the bin.  Two different lenses, two different reactions on the part of the viewer.

Killing your babies…

February 18, 2010 Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Killing your babies…

In videogames there are different types of design documents. There can be one for the Ui, there can be a purely technical document that deals just with the solutions that the programmers need to work with, but before all these other, more specialized forms come into play, there is your master document. When you pitch a game concept to your
producer, whether you be already embedded in the industry or not, you’re going to be asked “do you have a design doc for that?” It’s the death question. If your answer is no, you’re dead on the water. Even if you put one together and come back in a week, that
moment of interest, that spark is GONE.  If you do have one, likely it is full of your hopes and dreams for this game. It has every cool trick, puzzle and visual dynamic you
want to see in your game. It’s probably so big that the game, as written will take years to develop and a team of hundreds to produce.

That’s okay. In fact, that’s GOOD, and I’ll tell you why.

It’s easier to kill than create. Every creative type has been exposed to this at some point or another. It’s easier to put in too much, then edit out the unnecesary fluff than it is to try and add more content, to fill in the gaps and extend a product. Realizing you’re
three levels short and having to figure out how to slot them in when you hit Alpha is a frakkin’ nightmare on SO many levels.

So this is where I am right now with our game. To borrow a term from the literary, I am killing my babies. Going through each and every level and figuring out what is essential, what is almost necesary and what is just going to bloat the thing like a week old corpse in the sea.

I have a whole a gameplay mechanic I had outlined in here that is, well, it’s useless. It gets used in one place to solve one puzzle and will suck up a ton of coding that could be better put to use elsewhere. It would be cool, but it will cripple something else that is far more important to the overall game. So I’m killing it, searching through the document and cutting it free like a wart gone bad. Finding any reference, any place it pops up and changing the pieces to more solidly support the “core” game mechanic.

It hurts, believe it or not. Taking that cool thing out feels like cutting off a toe. But I can already see how the rest of the game is going to be stronger for it, how this pruning and butchery will make the center stronger, tighter. The blossom that will result is going
to be a solid, robust thing, rather than the weedy puffs of “cool” factor that they were headed to grow into before.

Now I just need to find the Bactine… and perhaps a roll of gauze.

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