Since Overwatch came out, during my free time I get to make a choice: work on a project – something creative, relaxing, fun, and maybe even a second revenue stream – or play Overwatch.
I’m not sure why, but sitting in front of a computer always wins. Playing a game that I’m not very good at; I’ve recently dropped from 50th to 44th level. In fact, it often makes me angry, yet I still play.
Building a world from the eyes of a two hundred year old Mage has never been dull, nor made me angry. Exacto blading out forest and grassy plains tiles, similarly. The ukulele has made me angry once or twice, but it’s certainly more rewarding than a computer game.
Is it just to do with effort required? Maybe. It’s certainly less work to sit at the computer and simply react to events happening to me. Am I just super lazy?
The other way of looking at it though is to see at what point I lost steam for a project.
For Barony, it’s all mostly done. The next piece of work is generating the map that gets sent along with each action sheet to the player. This will involve a bunch of design work – getting a picture on to a page. That’s not something I’m very good at at all. That actually is frustrating. I do know about Hexographer, and maybe I should just bite the bullet and buy that, but it’s frustrating that I have to rely and learn another piece of software because of a lack in my own creativity. That’s what this whole process is about: being more creative.
For Arcana Delve I’ve stumbled upon a similar issue: designing the cards. I feel like there should be pictures of the monster’s you’re fighting, and the items you’ve collected. Also, it required me to start using a desktop publishing program, with a mail merger style feature to produce many cards. I got around that by drawing out the cards by hand, but when you need six of the same card it can get a little boring. I’ve since gotten Office 360, including Publisher so maybe that can help.
Maybe I just need to stop making excuses!
It’s the art that makes me struggle the most. So I feel I should be focusing on philosophy of design, and encouraging players to use their imagination rather than relying on the crutch of images. Text in place of pictures, maybe. That doesn’t help with maps (or does it?) but it can certainly help on other parts of the project.
To encourage that, I’ve decided to set myself a daily word count to reach. It’s actually really low: around 300 words per day (so this blog post should cover it), but it means I’m actually making small amounts of progress at least rather than none.