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Dreamons Story Planning, Scattered Connections, Tomb Raider III

11 months ago1,488 words

I've been working on character revisions and story stuff for Dreamons, I talked to a couple of friends but not the counsellor, and I'm finding Tomb Raider III more frustrating than fun!

I've been writing these blog posts on Sunday, though Friday might be a better day for it, so then I can put game dev stuff out of my mind for both Saturday and Sunday and return refreshed on Monday. I've been struggling to actually make anything on Fridays because I've been having counselling on those days anyway (though the travel and session only eat up like three hours, the effects of anxiety seep out into the rest of the day), so... I'm writing this today!

Sadly, the excited enthusiasm that led to almost constant productivity last week faded around mid-Monday, in part because the damn Unity bug I hoped had gone came back. Then I had to deal with some other technical issue with a note-taking app I use for brainstorming which led to lost time and... pfff. Frustrating. Again, the anxiety surrounding the things takes up more time than the incidents themselves.

Mostly I've spent the week refining narrative ideas I wrote about in ∞ last Sunday's post ∞. I wrote about some of the revisions in a post on ∞ my Patreon ∞ earlier in the week. In that post, I talked about how I'm using the psychological concept of ∞ Jungian archetypes ∞ to guide the designs of characters, and how I'd revised five of these six dreamon characters that I posted here a couple of weeks ago:



So now they look like this:




I'm still trying to work out a lot of story details, though. I know the broadest of broad strokes - that they're each personifications of negative thoughts - but actually turning that into a workable story is taking more effort. Like how the cast of Inside Out are personified emotions, but the actual story of the film is far more than just that.

I want something short and snappy, not some convoluted 50-hour plot, but a short final duration doesn't necessarily mean an extremely short planning stage.

I have some ideas, and was going to post them on Patreon, but I feel unsure how much story stuff people might want me to share. It's important when writing stories to see them from a big-picture, top-down perspective, starting with a general beginning and end and filling in the connecting pieces after the basic arc is mostly established, but posting about that might mean potentially spoiling the ending or any surprises.

Not for the first time, I wonder what other storywriters do, especially solo authors. Do they just write in a vacuum, and only show someone at the end? Hmm.

I was also planning to add some new body parts to the dreamon characters' models to match their redesigns, though I only got as far as adding Spryad's hairstyle and horns before the Unity bug threw me off.






I had another counselling session today... or at least I was supposed to, but I spent all morning in anxious anticipation about it (or rather about the journey to get there, or the idea of leaving the house at all), and was all dressed and ready and literally on my way to the bus stop when I got a call - not even from her, but from her colleague - saying she had to cancel due to illness. Part of me wonders and worries whether 'illness' here means something more mental, and some specific insecurities make me concerned it might be related to seeing me in particular, but hopefully I'm being delusional and she's just woken up with a bad cold or something.

It means two weeks without a session though, since I had the brain scan last Friday instead.

I did however have hours-long talks with my two remaining uni friends this week, so that was unusual and interesting. I suppose it's nice to know that I do have a couple of real-world peers who I can share genuinely interesting ideas and mutual support with, who I care about and who seem to care about me in return, though we agreed we should talk more often, and when we've said as much in the past that hasn't happened. It's a shame it's not easier to meet up and go for walks or something. We have to make do with phone or video calls. I really miss going out for long walks with them back in uni.

(Maybe it's sad that having two whole conversations in a week, wow! is such a big deal for me, but I wonder how common long, one-on-one, mutually focused conversations about struggles and feelings are for most people.)

Both of them seem to be struggling to find connections with other people almost as much as I am. One said she finally understood what I meant about how hard it is to find friends in the post-education world. They're both slim, not-ugly women in their mid-twenties, so they've got boyfriends, of course, but I suppose it's surprising to me that despite being members of what so many lonely, frustrated online mens' groups believe is a group who are 'playing life on easy mode', their social worlds are almost as small as my own. Almost; I'm still the least lucky in that regard. But not by so drastic a degree that we're essentially from different planets.





I'm up to Tomb Raider III now! It's even more frustratingly difficult than the others! I have no idea how I finished it as a child. So much of the gameplay seems to be about figuring out where I even need to go, which specific rock in some corner I can actually jump on, which is so different to how games are made these days. I'm stubbornly refusing to look up online guides for help, though, meaning more than half my time is spent running around lost.

Oh, what's that? Is that busily-textured rock slightly flatter than the others so I can step on it rather than sliding off? Ah, great, I've found the thread! So I'll just jump up here, and- oh. A rock just fell on my head out of nowhere with only a split second to react. HOW FUN. Now to return to the start of the level because this game did away with the previous one's save-anywhere system in favour of collectible save points which can only be used once, and which are so rarely-placed I can run around for half an hour without seeing one!!

Oh well! I've almost got through all of these old Tomb Raider games now!! What a fun and relaxing way to spend my time!!!

Here's something bizarre, though: I hadn't thought about these old Tomb Raider games in years; I can't remember what it was that inspired me to replay them. Since I started them two or three weeks ago, though, I've seen maybe five posts across several online platforms directly or indirectly mentioning them. Not the Tomb Raider franchise in general, but the original trilogy specifically. In a couple of cases, even the exact game in the trilogy I was currently playing when I saw the post. One was a model of Lara in an outfit from the second one on a 3D model site, another was a screenshot of the game in a UFO subreddit showing an 'Element 115' item you can get in 'this old game', which didn't even name Tomb Raider.

People who view the world through a purely materialist lens see things like this as pure, meaningless coincidence; you only pay attention because the idea is in your head, but you otherwise come across similar things all the time and usually don't notice, or commit them to memory, they say.

Personally, I prefer to see the world as more 'magical' than that. To acknowledge that what we don't - or can't, with our biological limitations - know or understand far, far exceeds what we do (or can). And as such I find such coincidences really rather fascinating!



Oh, also, I've never been great at checking or replying to comments, but I seem to have been getting worse at that with comments on this site recently. Sorry about that! One of things I really need to try to get better at.