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Atonal Dreams Weekly Update 20 - Annoyingly Unproductive!

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,280 words

I've not made much progress this week, to my annoyance!

As I wrote about at the start of ∞ the personal (or I suppose political/psychological) post I wrote the other day ∞, I've had a slump this week. It's frustrating, since the previous week was so productive! In that post, like many times before, I likened it (metaphorically) to weather: sometimes it's sunny, sometimes it's cloudy, and sometimes you make plans for a day out only for it to pour down with rain and there's not really anything you can do about it other than change those plans. Last week was sunny in my mind, this week was rainy, for just as clear a reason as the external weather changes.

I'm looking into possible lifestyle factors that I could maybe change, though a lot of it probably due to the nature of the current task. I'm still working on the script, which is essentially pure creativity. Purely creative exercises like this require inspiration and motivation beyond a straightforward mechanical task you have to just do and know how to do, like, say, washing dishes or something, because you have to pull entirely new things out of the aether somehow.

Even if you don't do art, you might know the feeling from having to write essays, assignments, etc. Putting them off until the last minute is a common thing - I certainly did that - because even when you tell yourself to start early or actually attempt to, it's so difficult to focus and so easy to get distracted, or you might even experience physiological barriers like headaches when you attempt to get words out, as is the case with me. And in my case here, I don't even have a deadline forcing me to just do it. Sure, I could set my own, but that never works since I always subconsciously know that I can just revise them as needed.

It's frustrating though because I want to get the game out there, so then people can (hopefully) enjoy it and I can (hopefully) get some money and maybe start building up my audience. I have a strong motivation to want to finish this. And I enjoy the work! Writing silly or moving dialogue in particular is one of the most enjoyable creative facets of game dev for me. But these abstract motivation and enjoyment annoyingly don't translate to actual productive motivation and enjoyment. Or at least not reliably (they did LAST week though!).

Burnout is a constant factor too, though. Here's a video I came across earlier this week:



The title is interesting: "How I Overcame My Game Dev Burnout...With Game Dev?!?"

He talks about how working on personal projects that cut out all the bits of game dev he found unpleasant to focus entirely on the bits he was most excited by was so energising because he was able to do stuff for himself without having to worry about what other people might think.

I've been doing a similar thing myself recently, as I may or may not have talked about before. I'm working on a couple of personal projects that I won't be showing off because they wouldn't be interesting to other people anyway, and because introducing others' judgement adds an enormous weight to creative efforts that I'm able to avoid by keeping things private. I feel bad about it, like I really should be sharing or devoting the entirety of my being to pleasing other people in some way, but I suspect these private personal projects are a common way for creative types to regain energy and motivation while also building up skills in the process. I know that while I won't be releasing my private projects, many of the things I develop for them do make it into actual games I intend to release, so I wouldn't call it entirely wasted time.

(I suppose it's like the difference between writing a comment on a blog/forum and writing an essay that'll be graded...)

Still, I wish I were doing more on Atonal Dreams. I'll get there, and I certainly don't intend to spend years on it. I was looking at some old blog posts about it this week (trying to rekindle motivation), and the earliest ones are 4-5 months old. So I've not been working on it that long, surprisingly. I've been working on Divine Dreams since the start of the year, or since the middle of last year if you count planning, and I'm using much of what I came up with for that in this, but even so, at least I'm not one of those indie devs who spends 3 or 5 years on a single mediocre puzzle game!



I've not done nothing this week! Though since it's all plot stuff, I'd only be spoiling things if I went into detail, so I'll only vaguely hint at some stuff.

Essentially I've had the skeleton of the whole plot planned since the beginning, and I have a a good idea of the beginning and ending in particular. What I've been trying to sort out this week is how the details of the middle tie it all together. Every creative session brings interesting new ideas, and I feel like I'm getting a better picture of exactly what I want to do each time, though it still feels a bit vague.

One revision I made now has the four main characters briefly split off into pairs, which I feel is always an interesting way to explore interaction dynamics and character psychology. So that'll be interesting to see once I get around to actually scripting and then eventually making it!

It's not something I crammed in just because I like the idea of splitting up parties, though. I'm trying to let how the characters might actually think drive every beat of the story. I remember years ago getting annoyed about how in earlier games like MARDEK, I took an events-driven approach to plotting, with actual character psychology and motivations barely considered at all. It's something I noticed other games typically did too: you have the forest dungeon, followed by the water dungeon, then the volcano one. Why do the characters go to them? Because those are the game world's elements and so there are dungeons devoted to them. But why do the characters go to them? What personally motivates them to even want to venture to such a place? Because they're 'heroes', 'adventurers', because they just happened to be in the way, because they were collecting N MacGuffins? If there was a reason at all, ∞ it felt contrived ∞.

In MARDEK 3, for example, you had to collect elemental crystals because the 'king' told you to. Mardek and his allies wanted to do this because the king told them to. What more do you need?!? You could say that the underlying motivation didn't come from nowhere - Qualna wanting to teach Rohoph a lesson - but that was tacked on at the end when my mind was about three years older than when I started. These days, I'm trying to consider things like that from the beginning.

And I do think that every one of the conversations I've planned or drafted so far says something about the characters' minds and motivations, hang-ups and histories. I wonder if it's something players will appreciate or even pick up on, though. We'll see.

I'll leave it at this for now. I wish I had more to say! And I wish I'd done more this week! Hopefully next week will be more productive...