I felt a great sense of accomplishment making this game on my own, though I know there is an oceans worth of improvement to be had still, it’s a big milestone for me so I thought I’d share the journey with you all in this post.
Picasso
Good artists copy, great artists steal.
This is a quote that has often resonated with me, but recently I started ruminating on it a bit more while driving alone in the car. Whats that really mean? To steal and not copy? Certainly a great artist isn’t someone that breaks into someone’s studio and steals their work off the easel calling it their own. I think the answer to that question can reveal a lot about the process of creativity and diffuse misconceptions about originality.
So my good friend Andy Moore [we worked on Protonaut together] is on a journey with his girlfriend Aubrey and a van named TIGVan [The Independent Gaming Van]. He just sent me a guest 222 post and it’s awesome.
So the winter has finally let up here in Iowa and it has me in a great mood. Say what you want about the harsh winters of the Midwest, it makes the Spring that much sweeter when it finally crops up through the icy tundra.
With the beautiful days ticking away as I’m stuck inside on my computer and a recent signup at Wakoopa, I’ve been more conscious of how I’m spending my time. It’s not that I’m completely wasting it but it certainly feels that way as I hear kids run around at recess outside or watch the clouds pass in front of bright blue skies. I’m always doing stuff in front of screens. You’d think I worshipped these guys, staring endlessly into their sputtering radiance. But no more!
Ok, this will be quick. I have a half dozen other posts I want to make but I’m in the middle of working on FOUR GAMES!!! Ahhhhh!
So I played an awesome game today, it’s called Specter Spelunker Shrinks. But when I got to the site I thought…
me
“Whoa, this is the same dude [NMcCoy] who did Wavespark?! Awesome!
I continued to believe that NMcCoy made this game and my idea of him as a developer was bolstered. I already loved Wavespark. So while that helped out my opinion of NMcCoy, I completely missed the fact that it was done by a different developer, Ken Grafals of Fall Damage Games. It’s quite easy, but the only difference is in the masthead [image at the top of a page]. See for yourself:
I started work on the Mikengreg logo around 3 months ago, it had gone pretty well for the most part but I stopped working on it regularly about a month ago. For that month I’ve felt a block swelling. I just got over that an hour ago. I’m fresh and excited and everything is in place now, but it was extremely tough getting to this point. Not in the way a difficult challenge is tough, like beating Sexy Hiking, but in the way you feel when you’re sick or hurt as a kid and you ask that big fatalistic question:
you
“Mom. Am I going to die?!”
This started out as a lengthy comment over at Edmund’s Do’s and Dont’s Manifesto on IndieGames. [via @godatplay] You should read that before reading this.
Edmund’s points are all very sound, but like any list, it’s easy to pick apart. But really what came out was a discussion about how each of us as developers approaches things from what sometimes is a vastly different angle. Stephen Lavelle [increpare] mentions how he takes issue with most of the points, and with good reason. Stephen makes games for very different reasons than Edmund. It got me thinking again about something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I was talked to Ben about creativity. We were chatting about his ongoing sideproject: Aztez and we got talking about collaborations and he mentioned how he sees most developers as one of two different types of creative people: Artists or Entertainers. That stuck with me and forced me to take it on and ask myself…
Me
Am I an Artist or an Entertainer?
tl;dr: I know this is over 2K words so if you just want to get an update on what’s going on right now and what we’re planning, skip to the 2010 heading at the end of the post.
Most individual years of my life have been pretty homogenous. Save an errant semester, my entire life up until a couple years ago has been calculated in years; Freshman Year of High School; Senior Year of College. While there are definitely a lot of up and downs within those years, nothing has been so completely sporadic as my 2009.
But like any year, it boils down to a handful of very important moments. Not all of them were instrumental, but in some way each defined a project or a period of time. I think this year was particularly unique because it was my first real year of being completely on my own. Kongregate was no longer funding Dinowaurs [although that stopped well before 2009 started] and everything was pretty much up to us. What game we were going to make and how that was going to pay the rent every month. We’re still learning, but we’re much better off now than we were and it’s thanks to this roller coaster we rode and the lessons it taught us.
Was in some sort of school (grad?) and we were discussing a book, afterward most people started reading in class but I had some sort of blackberry thing and I couldn’t figure out how to turn the volume off/down and people started getting annoyed. I finally figured it out but kept using it everyone began to sneer because I wasn’t reading. They quietly whispered to the teacher and finally I turned around and said “Look! as a rule, why don’t you just mind your own work and focus on that. This isn’t high school.” Things escalated and I had to leave in a hurry. I told a friend nearby to pack and watch my stuff in case I didn’t come back soon enough. I left and ran through the fields. The kind of running done by Princess Mononoke. Very low to the ground, fast and frantic. Eventually I got onto the sidewalk near a road and met someone on a bridge. I didn’t know who it was but we fought. Read the rest of this entry »
