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Dropped off the face of longform posts for a variety of reasons but I'm back now.
Not on track to win NaNo but I DO have a pile of about 20k words worth of meandering that I can maybe edit into part of something presentable. At some point I sort of accepted that if I ever got this fic readable I was going to have to cut a lot of what I was writing and just made peace with it.
I feel like I write a whole lot of stuff that doesn't work out lately, way more than I used to. Not sure if my standards got higher or what.
I cannot give up posting on Twitter for the life of me but my posts have started occasionally blowing up again (like in the range of 500-1k likes/retweets). It's equal parts dopamine and stressful. One of these was a joke post about how goofy the lines people draw between RPG genres are and I got people legit arguing about what constituted a "JRPG" in the replies, as though the totally arbitrary nature of these categorizations wasn't the whole point of the joke. Oof.
I've been replaying Hatoful Boyfriend (I played the original so now I'm cruising through the HD version on Steam) and I'm yet again struck by how good it is. This game kicked off an arms race of sorts where indie devs tried to one-up each other on insane dating sim premises and pretty much all of them flopped drastically because everbody really took the wrong lesson from it. Like, Hatoful Boyfriend has a silly premise but it completely commits to it, and builds on it to make something with substance.
There's just really no getting around just giving a shit, plain and simple. Even the goofiest, dumbest idea imaginable is worth making but only if you actually DO think it's worth making. Obviously this isn't the only thing wrong with the glut of failed gimmick VNs but I think it's like, the central problem. You can tell somebody thought the pigeon dating sim was worth making. Hatoful Boyfriend kind of leans into the "silly premise taken seriously" angle (though it is still pretty funny) but the content doesn't have to be serious -- I mean, I think another example of this is Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, which is 100% a joke from start to finish but it's a joke somebody thought was really fucking funny and committed to harder than I think anybody has ever committed to a joke in video game history. You just have to take what you're doing seriously.
I've been thinking a lot about game design, and ideas, and art, and ambitions lately. I don't think your idea has to be grand or meaningful or even like...good, necessarily, for any particular value of "good". You just have to think it's worth doing for some reason, even if it's just because the concept makes you laugh or you think it'll be fun to put together or you like to imagine people looking at the result and going "what the fuck". That's, like. That's the thing.
Of course, like all thoughts about art, this is a principle I struggle to apply to myself, lol.
Not on track to win NaNo but I DO have a pile of about 20k words worth of meandering that I can maybe edit into part of something presentable. At some point I sort of accepted that if I ever got this fic readable I was going to have to cut a lot of what I was writing and just made peace with it.
I feel like I write a whole lot of stuff that doesn't work out lately, way more than I used to. Not sure if my standards got higher or what.
I cannot give up posting on Twitter for the life of me but my posts have started occasionally blowing up again (like in the range of 500-1k likes/retweets). It's equal parts dopamine and stressful. One of these was a joke post about how goofy the lines people draw between RPG genres are and I got people legit arguing about what constituted a "JRPG" in the replies, as though the totally arbitrary nature of these categorizations wasn't the whole point of the joke. Oof.
I've been replaying Hatoful Boyfriend (I played the original so now I'm cruising through the HD version on Steam) and I'm yet again struck by how good it is. This game kicked off an arms race of sorts where indie devs tried to one-up each other on insane dating sim premises and pretty much all of them flopped drastically because everbody really took the wrong lesson from it. Like, Hatoful Boyfriend has a silly premise but it completely commits to it, and builds on it to make something with substance.
There's just really no getting around just giving a shit, plain and simple. Even the goofiest, dumbest idea imaginable is worth making but only if you actually DO think it's worth making. Obviously this isn't the only thing wrong with the glut of failed gimmick VNs but I think it's like, the central problem. You can tell somebody thought the pigeon dating sim was worth making. Hatoful Boyfriend kind of leans into the "silly premise taken seriously" angle (though it is still pretty funny) but the content doesn't have to be serious -- I mean, I think another example of this is Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, which is 100% a joke from start to finish but it's a joke somebody thought was really fucking funny and committed to harder than I think anybody has ever committed to a joke in video game history. You just have to take what you're doing seriously.
I've been thinking a lot about game design, and ideas, and art, and ambitions lately. I don't think your idea has to be grand or meaningful or even like...good, necessarily, for any particular value of "good". You just have to think it's worth doing for some reason, even if it's just because the concept makes you laugh or you think it'll be fun to put together or you like to imagine people looking at the result and going "what the fuck". That's, like. That's the thing.
Of course, like all thoughts about art, this is a principle I struggle to apply to myself, lol.