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This Creative Path, But Should I Be Walking Down It?

6 years ago3,600 words

Here's a video of Zaffre and Cerise talking, showing the kind of format I've been intending to use to tell the Taming Dreams story. I'm so unsure about whether it's worth doing, though... Am I naive? Is this childish? Would it only lead to my destruction even if it did one day work out?

I've written about this in previous posts, but essentially, I've been aiming to return to Taming Dreams, but not as a game. Making games is exciting in theory, but extremely difficult in practice, and it's just not practical for me to make that story as a game at this point. Unfortunately.

For a while now, I've been playing around with several iterations of what I'll describe as a 'conversation thing'. Essentially, it's 3D characters just having conversations with one another, and that's it. Sort of like cutscenes - talky ones rather than actiony ones, at least - without a game tying them together.

It started off as a way of soothing my own loneliness, as I used to it just make mostly female characters of mine talk about fairly mundane things that I wish I could talk about with friends. It was sad, and embarrassing, and I never intended to show it to anyone out of shame, but it's actually brought me quite a bit of entertainment - comfort, even? - as I've worked on its various versions, which is what's made me wonder whether it could work as a format for telling stories that I actually could share.

I tried to do that months ago with a 2D browser version of the thing, in what I called ∞ Divine Dreams ∞. While I liked what I'd made enough to compose music for it, and to have an urge to return to it every so often, I realised the limitations, confusion, and lack of immersion that came from the 2D format, the static art, and the way that the dialogue took the form of these text-like messages, with several on screen at a time.

I made ∞ this 3D browser version ∞ next, though it involved two non-characters talking rubbish and used a Unity browser plugin that probably restricted accessibility.

I now have a version with Zaffre and Cerise - the protagonists from Miasmon - which is a video, as I've been wondering whether that's the most accessible format for this. I would have uploaded it to YouTube to make it even easier to access, but it's not finished yet - or at least it's not polished - so here's a link to an mp4 video file that should work on most devices, I think:

∞ This is a link! Please click it! ∞



It's probably best to watch it - if you intend to at all - before reading on, so then your perceptions of it aren't affected by what I say next.

As I said, it's not finished yet. I was hoping to make it more finished and refined before showing it off, but surgery is getting closer and I'm running out of time, plus it's just meant as a demonstration so it didn't really seem worth perfecting.

The video quality is poorer than I'd prefer. I'd have to look into recording video - and/or get a better program than the first free one I found - to improve on that.

How it works is that each line of dialogue has an associated facial expression and pose. It's a system I've been using - in its essential form at least - since at least the MARDEK days, though it's advanced a lot since then. Each pose should have a subtle looping animation, but most of them are static currently so the characters are motionless, like statues. The poses also transition between one another using basic tweening, which looks unnatural, unnerving, either because it's too fast or the limbs move in ways that real ones wouldn't. It's set up so then I can make custom transition animations between poses, which does look a whole lot better based on some experimenting that I've done, but the whole impending surgery thing has robbed me of the energy to make those transition animations for this, even though they only take a few minutes.

Also, they don't move their mouths when they speak. I've experimented with this, and there are three possibilities: One is that I keep it like this. Another is that they have a basic "talking" animation that plays for a second or two; perhaps different ones depending on the mouth used for the expression. Another is that I could have phoneme-based mouth movements that are generated by the text, essentially lip syncing which I did manage to get working... but it looks a bit weird if it's not accompanied by sound. I imagine the second option would be the best one to use, but I wasn't able to implement it in this.

Since these are old characters, I felt it was important to try and capture the personalities that they had back when they were originally in Miasmon. These aren't really the kinds of characters I'd make these days, but they amused me, back in the day. Originally I just copied one of the conversations from the Miasmon game, and had them say that, but I wanted to try to write something that wouldn't require knowledge of that game to know who they were, which is why this turned out like it did.

It's very much just banter, silly and aimless, hit-and-miss, so I don't know how appealing it is to read for people who aren't me. I imagine something with more of a story, something that made you wonder what happened next, would be more able to hook people on the idea. I hoped to make the first bits of Taming Dreams so then people might be interested to find out more, but again, thoughts of the impending surgery have been getting in the way.

I'd like to hear what you think of it anyway, but my thoughts about it are so uncertain and insecure, for several reasons. They've been swirling around in my head for ages, and I've probably talked about them in various places before, but I want to do so again here.



I wonder why people read this blog. I'd been assuming that people would be more interested in my posts about my creative work than about my personal life, but the opposite seems to be true. The recent posts of the 3D models of these characters got relatively little attention, for example. Maybe it's because they were posted fairly close together and people only look at the latest post while ignoring the rest, or maybe people just aren't really interested in them. I don't know.

The audience for this blog is very limited, and it's shrinking rather than growing. I imagine it's mostly fans of MARDEK and my old- well, probably mostly just MARDEK, since that's the one that seems to have got the most attention back in the day, so most people who are aware of me would have fond memories of it. And nostalgia is a powerful driving force, so it's probably what motivates people to check out what I'm doing these days. Maybe? I can only speculate, and go by what people have said to me. As time goes on and interest wanes, though, and as people's lives and new forms of media take their attention, they stop checking this blog, and the posts get fewer and fewer views.

Since I'm not exactly advertising this anywhere and there isn't really any content worth bringing more people here - there's not really anything you could share in a "hey, come and look at this!" kind of way to people who've never heard of me - it's going to continue on in this way until there's probably nobody left. It's why (well one of the reasons why) I feel it's important to get the ball rolling on some regularly-updating creative project that people who've never heard of me before could find and develop a maintained interest in. Then, I'd hope, it'd spread by word of mouth if not by direct advertisement, and slowly I'd accumulate a fan base again and a motivation to continue the project of which they were fans.

There are all kinds of concerns about that, though... You can probably easily imagine some yourself. Maybe you already are doing, while reading me say such things. I want to touch on three here, just to get them out if nothing else.


Am I just being naive?
I mean, yes, I probably am being naive, as I seem to be quite a naive person in general. Perhaps it seems delusional to think that I could make something that would be worthy of a fanbase, especially something like this. No, it's got a bunch of issues with it that would just be off-putting to potential viewers. It's easy to imagine or notice them.

People like listening to people talk, verbally, but they don't like reading words; since it's not voice-acted, it's dull and uninteresting. People seem willing to read the subtitles in things like anime, or in game cutscenes, but I know it's not the same thing. The pacing of the dialogue might also be too frustratingly slow or too fast, depending on the individual.

Maybe the visuals aren't up to scratch, maybe the characters or their facial or body language look just a bit off. Maybe the writing isn't targeting a clear audience. Maybe the focus entirely on conversations rather than action scenes is something most people wouldn't like. (I see it more like a webcomic, most of which are essentially just text and that's acceptable... but again, I know people think in terms of categories and would be willing to tolerate things in one medium but not necessarily in others. Technically action scenes would be possible with the setup I've got, and I would plan to have some mild 'action' scenes throughout the story, but I tend to zone out during action scenes in other media so I don't really have the interest in focusing on them in this.)

There are all kinds of things I could wonder "maybe this, maybe that" about... and I do. I try to predict what people might think about it, how they might feel about it, before I begin, especially since in the past these voiced doubts were the first things that people said in comments whenever I presented a new idea. "But what if...", "maybe people will...", etc.

More than that, though, is it naive to think that attracting fans from any creative work is possible? Sure, some artists do gather large amounts of fans who love their work and want to see more, but there are many, many more who pour their hearts into their creations and go entirely unnoticed.

Is there any hope that *I*, with my aversion to social networking, could accumulate a following for my creative work?

I don't know. I've done it before, though circumstances were entirely different then. MARDEK was a genre that was popular to a large number of people, but which had no good representations in Flash. Getting on the front page on sites like Kongregate meant that people who checked that page every day saw my work. If not for those factors, I would never have got the attention that I did. I do realise that, and that it's not easy to replicate.

Mostly I'm just trying this format because it seems like a way I can use the skills I've developed and which I enjoy using without spending months or years trying to finish and release a game that I'd release in a one-shot way. I don't know if it'll work, at all, from a 'product release' standpoint. I've mostly been trying to assess whether it'll work from a 'can I actually make it' standpoint, which seems more important.


Is this childish?
I'm very uncomfortably aware that I've not really grown up, that I've not integrated myself into the Adult World. I don't have a nine-'til-five job, a spouse, children, or even a place of my own.

I don't spend my time watching or reading gritty dramas about family or politics, about prostitute murders and the pain of unwanted pregnancy, about totalitarian regimes or the danger of excess materialism. Not really. I watch things like Steven Universe instead. Created universes, with rules and customs and inhabitants disconnected from our own.

It bothers me, on some level, how once you reach a certain age, you're expected to like nothing but these 'mature' works of fiction or fact or half-fact or whatever. Things rooted in usually-darker versions of the real world, which build their stories out of complex concepts or intense issues that wouldn't be fit for non-grown-ups.

Whenever I hear the stuff my parents watch on the television, it's either daytime documentaries/lifestyle stuff about old manors, cake-baking, or gardening, or it's films with a lot of calm, serious, suspenseful silence, interspersed with serious-sounding Americans seriously either shouting or shooting at each other, seriously, generally for reasons involving sex, drugs, infidelity, or murder. Adult Drama. Serious. Grown-up.

I suppose the media we're drawn to is, in some sense, a reflection of the world in which we live. People who actually live in the real world of adults would be more drawn to interpretations or distortions of that world than to media that explores a world they've left or never knew.

Or perhaps it's a creativity thing? Openness? I don't know.

I just know that in the stories I want to tell, I do explore deeper topics, or try to, but they're more world-transcendent - the nature of the soul and afterlife, etc - rather than, well, indulging in the darkest corners of Samsara, you could say. I'd also struggle to write about things I've no experience with, like what it's like to be a parent, whereas I've spent most of my life exploring other worlds via fantasy.

Many adults devote themselves to telling these not-exactly-typically-'Adult' stories in some form or another. Some big web-based inspirations like Order of the Stick, Homestuck, and Homestar Runner (all of which I've mentioned often) come to mind, as their creators were all around my current age or older (I think), yet they seemed to consider it worthwhile devoting their time to such things. Then there are creators such as Disney or Pixar who tell stories through animation which isn't For Adults, but which has something to say to people of any age. Or people who make cartoons explicitly for children. People who make video games. And so on.

There are things like Marvel, which is drawn, written, acted, etc by people much older than me, despite being essentially puerile at their core. While they seem to aim for the dark-and-gritty not-for-kids-you-know aesthetic, it's still essentially "this guy is MORE POWERFUL than that Evil Baddie!!"

It's interesting though looking back at old stories, the ones that last through the ages. Most of those are essentially superheroes; Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Hercules, Zeus and Thor and so on. Maybe they had something to say about the boring mundanities of everyday life, or maybe they were never meant to; maybe having something grander to escape to is valuable in itself. When I visited a Buddhist temple in South Korea, the guide told us that the elaborate carvings and sculptures represented deities who were "as strong as seven horses!" or who "blew [other deity] across the world with the power of his breath!", things like that. It seems that these superhuman qualities appeal to something fundamental in human psychology.

This is something I think about a lot because, well, people judge others on what they decide to spend their life doing. If I were, say, a neurosurgeon, then in everyone's eyes my contribution to humanity would be a worthwhile one, even if all of the people I operated and saved were dregs of society who never actually achieved anything themselves. However, if I drew comic books for a living, less open-minded "grown-ups" would look down their noses at me and wonder why I'd not grown up, why I didn't get a "real job".

One of the things that's been coming to mind as a rebuttal to their imagined judgement is that pragmatic jobs are necessary for our way of life, yes... but once our physical needs are met, art and entertainment are what we choose to spend our time on. People can live for, say, Harry Potter or Marvel in the way that they would be far less likely to live for Heinz baked beans or their dentist. Without people creating art and entertainment, without something on which to spend the time that jobs are worked to earn, what would be the point of maintaining society at all?

It's interesting then that when a young person tells their parents they want to be an artist, they're scoffed at, told to abandon their dreams and get a 'real job'... but describing a painting as a "genuine Van Gogh" immediately translates in most people's minds as 'extremely valuable'.

Anyway. I don't know whether spending my life (assuming I live at all!) doing art is worthwhile, and writing this post isn't going to magically change that... But these are some of the many thoughts I've been having about it recently anyway.


But what if I did get a following?
People judge others, all the time. Most people would wish awful things on someone for unacceptable behaviour that they themselves would want to be forgiven for if they were the perpetrator. It's the Fundamental Attribution Error, at its core: we are our own universes, and we're intimately aware of the steps in our personal journey that led to any of our actions... but as we're not privy to the details of everyone else's backstory, their behaviour must be motivated by some innate evil. We make mistakes, though we're ultimately good deep-down; others are Bad People who deserve to be incinerated by the fire of 'justice'.

My past is far from squeaky-clean. I've never committed any terrible crimes or anything, and I've certainly tried to be nice and considerate... I don't like to see suffering in any living creature, and the thought of causing pain causes me pain. It's not like I'm the sort of person who - like some - would tweet gladly about how individuals - or entire groups of people - deserved to be destroyed.

And yet I've spent large chunks of the past several years trying to cope with my loneliness by making what in the eyes of others would be pervy art. Nothing fetishistic or bizarre, but embarrassing nonetheless. I've also made all kinds of social mistakes - arising from poor socialisation and a strange mind - with people both online and in person, which have upset people much more than I ever would have liked.

There's a lot in my past that people could dredge up to paint me as a creep or a monster or an object of mockery or whatever else. Either due to the disconnect that comes from the lack of embodiment online interactions afford, due to low personal Agreeableness on their part, mental illness, or whatever else... And at least some people would join in simply for the spectacle of it if nothing else.

There are websites out there devoted to tearing apart webcomics and their creators, in disturbing personal detail. I'm not going to link to any, but I've seen them before. I remember reading years ago that Tim Buckley, the guy behind Ctrl+Alt+Del (ah, memories), once "showed his penis to an underage girl" (or something) as evidence for him being an overall arsehole who nobody should respect. There was some dark pleasure in seeing this person - to whom I had no emotional connection - demonised in this way, and I felt the subtle thrill of it myself. Curiosity to read more, and no impulse to defend him or doubt the picture people painted. I suppose seeing others' warts helps us feel more comfortable in our own skins. "Sure, I might have broken a few hearts and bullied a few people, but it's not like I've ever showed my bits to a minor, like HE did! Boo him! Boo!"

"Let he who is without sin throw the first stone". When I'm accosted by this hypothetical mob, I imagine asking "so what's the worst thing you've ever done? Are you willing to share?". Of course, that wouldn't work at all, because people don't think like that, but it does seem a shame that people would want to ruin others for their mistakes while expecting their own to go unpunished.



There's loads more I could say about all those things, and I've been wanting to write separate posts about them for a while now... but I'll leave it at this for now, all crammed together into this one because time's running out. It's a bit rambly, but I don't have time to edit it either.

I don't know what'll happen with the surgery (I'll write another post just before I go to the hospital, by the way), so maybe I won't be able to go on making creative things anyway... But these are the thoughts I have about my place on that journey at the moment. Hopefully you got something out of the video, or out of these ramblings.