Random Mutterings Part 4

So, I’ve touched on story, and touched on characters.  I’m not really sure what’s left to really talk about.  I honestly think I’m just postponing the inevitable here simply because I’m getting cold feet again.  As a general rule, my self-confidence in my own abilities varies depending on how well I think I’m going.  This, I suppose, is common for everybody.

Anyway, I think the only thing really left to touch upon is art work.  I’ll preface this by saying that I have no artistic talent whatsoever.  Well, at least not in terms of pretty graphics and drawings.  I worked for about a year and a half as a web developer, but the majority of my time was spent editing the works of somebody else, or making buttons.  I’m really good at buttons…because the graphics program we used (Macromedia Adobe Fireworks) had built in button templates.  I developed a single template on my own that I used for a while on my own personal web page that looked surprisingly decent, but that was probably the extent of my skills.  I just don’t have the eye for it.

So, obviously, since art work is such an important part of a game, we were going to have to find somebody to help do it for us.  I was fortunate enough to have a good friend who was quite capable of drawing in the style we were looking for.  While she’ll never agree to it, I felt she was quite talented.  But this gave us the opportunity to put pictures to the people we were creating.  

As I’ve said previously I believe that graphics can help drive a story because you suddenly know what you’re really looking at, and that in turn can help you better develop it.  It’s amazingly freeing to suddenly know what your character looks like, because then you can better interact with them.  When you know who they are, you really write better for them.  While everybody may have a mental image in their mind about what a character they’re creating looks like, that image will always change.  It’s an enjoyable feeling to have your character out there on paper.  Your own imagination will be less likely to run away form you when you have a more physical manifestation staring you back in the face.

So with an artist in place, we set to work on creating our characters.  And characters were all we really got around to completing.  Again, much of the focus was on the characters from act 1 because they were the people I was actively working on.  I’m sure real studios would have done it a lot different and worked on all of the characters.  But, as we’ve covered already, what we were doing was hardly the same as a large development studio.  We liked to do things our own way, whether that was the best choice or not.

There was some talk about development of landscape, monsters, weapons, and the like, but that never really happened.  It’s amazing how a project that began as one thing can really morph into another.  I think subconsciously this was becoming less and less of a “game project” for me, and more something else.  Having spent most of my formative years reading fantasy and science fiction I was probably influenced in one way or another into becoming something of an author.  It’s probably the dream of readers to write their own story, so I doubt I’m alone here.  But, I don’t think that many people actually sit down and think of the logistics of the whole affair.

“Real” writers make it look easy because they already have the book out, but I expect they all go through the same thing as I am.  Frustration, fear, mental blocks, whatever, it all just piles up, and for your first book, it’s probably even worse than later on.  I expect that the real difference between and author and the next wannabe is that the author actually summoned up the courage to write the book and kept going even when it got hard.  I suppose that’s what’s going to happen here.  Either I actually get the story written down here and maybe go somewhere with it, or this blog just fade into oblivion like every other blog project I’ve started.

Anyway, as I don’t believe in doing anything even remotely like work over the weekend I doubt there will be another update here until Monday.  Perhaps in the time between now and then I’ll dig up my source material and try to post the introduction I already wrote a few years back, and then perhaps I’ll get to write the rest of the story.  Time will tell; I’ve got a lot written down, I’m hoping it will be a fairly simple thing to update what’s already there into a more…useful format.