Slowly writing.

I am very slowly writing these days.

I'm also drawing a little bit, now and then.

The weather has been so hot that it is tough to do much of anything.

Nothing is going on!

    Here I am writing an update that nothing's really going on (game-wise)!

    These days I've been updating stuff onto Youtube and have been experimenting with a video camera I finally found after six months of unpacking since moving six months ago, in addition to uploading time lapses of drawings I had done in oekaki (basically the animation captures, sped up) or had streamed on livestream.

    This year, instead of holding weekly 1-3 hour long streams where I chat and drew on a Tuesday night I've been drawing an oekaki each week. Which was all in all successful until last week where I ended up missing a week because the server I was drawing on wet down when I tried to post the drawing on a Saturday night: I had waited until the last minute to draw that week's oekaki, and it wasn't exactly drawn the way i had intended, I think.

    But I think I may go back to streaming for a couple hours one day a week eventually because I liked the performance aspect of it. Also I'm hoping to take requests/commissions through the stream, kind of like a business' office hours.

    Anyway, the game...

    I still work on the game on paper almost daily, but it's a lot of writing and starting over and so on. Even though I know the beginning of a story is not the most important thing about making the entire game, and that the perfect opening story may not come to me until I write the rest of the game, I still feel that that is the first part that should be made before the rest of the game's gears are to be dealt with.

    In fact, actually I believe the beginning of any story is as important as the rest of the story, as the beginning of a story sets the mood or level the entire story is in. The beginning of the story is where they story's rules are laid out to the reader so that the reader can make a judgement as to what to expect from a story, and then it's the writer's job to exceed those expectations within the rules set in the beginning of the story. So, in fact, the beginning of a story is very important, because rules are important, because without rules in a story there's nothing for the story to challenge or work around.

    Speaking of stories, lately I've been thinking a lot about drawing a short story comic, like I used to do pre-2006. It used to be that I'd run with the slightest contrived idea and take it all the way to comic production, but these days I just consider an idea, laugh at how contrived and disorderly it is, and then go play games or organize my room (which is an ongoing project that surely will see a completion date) because I'm just not that gullible anymore. I want a good story, not some story I'll pursue for about 20 what pages and then give up on because whatever was motivating me to draw that story is over. Also I fully intend for this story to be a self-contained story with no need for expansion past the pages that are to be planned for it, but for now it's still in the "write down the events that happen in the story in a sequence with bullet points" stage so.. nothing to show here either.

   I've been watching a lot of Korean dramas these days hoping that they would help me write, and while it's helped me a great deal at writing more argumentative dialogues it hasn't helped that much because once I was hooked I had a tough time watching some of them. I finally persuaded myself to stop watching 짝패/The Duo this week because I wanted to watch with someone else, which meant finding subs for it as I had been watching it raw. I only need subs for Chinese dramas these days. Korean, Japanese, and English shows I can watch without any subs, which is convenient for me but also a very lonely because for Korean or Japanese shows without any subs there's very few or no people to talk about the show. Though that is also true for (obscure) English shows too.

    Sure, I want to pump out the game fastquick and benefit from it, but I also have some tough expectations to meet too. Since I like to draw drawings with as few mistakes as possible, the story has to match (=have as few flaws as possible) as does the game aspect of it and so on. I think my goal with the game world is hazy too, since it is a new thing to me. I've been drawing for almost 10 years and I've been playing violin since I was 5, so those things are familiar to me. But as for making games I've only been slightly intrigued by that for a few weeks when RPG maker 95 came out a million years ago and then again, just in the last few years through private (custom) MMORPG servers and visual novels, so it's still a fairly unfamiliar thing for me. I just know some games are awesome and some games are terrible, but I've yet to understand all of why some games are some way.

    In any event, these are a lot of weak sissy excuses, and I'd still like to make a game. I just have to make sense of the chaos that I call a "game idea".