Of late, I have had an itch to work on my game design. This is great in some respects. I love thinking about how MMOs work and it offers me a good number of posts as I start bringing my thoughts onto my blog. Which obviously this blog is about game design in the first place.
However, at this point in my life, game design isn’t really the itch that I need to be looking at. My current job at a helpdesk is ending at the end of the year, so it is really a time that I need to be concentrating on my writing in hopes of being able to sell my first novel to a publishing company so that I can get by on that money until my second novel can surface and so on and so forth.
THAT would be ideal, but then the itch is where it is, and the question then becomes should I ignore this itch, or scratch while I have it? I mean for me, I think I get my best work done in any particular field when I have an urge to spend time on it. This is largely because when I have this urge, I go all out. I get obsessive. I work on it any chance I have, and when I don’t have the chance, I think about it as well. So why not work on my game when I am in this sort of mood?
Well the answer to this is because this is, I feel the definition of writer’s block. My inability to concentrate on what I NEED to do for my writing to flourish. I think it isn’t bad to explore my current desire to work on my game, but it isn’t helping me as the likeliness of me actually getting a job in the video game industry is small. What I should do is at the very least give myself 15-30 minutes on weekdays, and an hour on weekends working on my novel, no matter what I do for it.
Currently, I should probably spend my time looking through and studying Macbeth which I want to have a mention of in my first novel. I just need to figure out which section to mention for the significance that I’m looking for. Once I can get past that I can write the scene that has been on my mind for the last month or so and then I can move on past that. (I have story ideas for all my dream sequences that I want to write already thought out but I really want to get this Macbeth scene down!)
With all this talk on game design, what exactly am I doing with this currently? Well I’ve been interested in mapping. I’ve been watching tutorial videos on how to map in Campaign Cartographer 3, which I’ve had as part of my ProFantasy Annual for quite awhile but I haven’t had time to sit down and watch. These videos are quite good and are all available for free on YouTube these days. Plus they’ve added mor for Dungeun Designer 3 as well which I’ve started going through. Here’s a sample: