New Beginnings for September

2019 so far has been a strange year, and going by very slowly. It hasn't been the best year, but so far we've upgraded New California to the point it's playable consistently bug free,  got STAVE, the physical card game I made, to 1.0, and the Morningstar Design Documents are at a place where they're ready to begin translating them into content and code.

I've also picked up playing music! 

It's the first time in my life touching an instrument, period, at 31 years old. 

Thomas surprised me with a Taglharpa one day, totally out of the blue, after talking about it back in January planning the OST for Morningstar.

The Taglharpa is a bowed lyre. In this case it's a Bass Taglharpa with 3 strings. A Base Drone string, a Middle Drone String, and a string which you can fret like a guitar as you bow across all three strings to change the notes. 

It's kind of a hybrid of a violin, a cello, and some otherworldly sound that's similar to a bag pipe.

Learning how to play it has been a daily task in the morning and evening. It's not going to be the only instrument in Morningstar, but getting a good basis on this so I can participate with Pablo and our other musical talent will be important in really nailing down the atmosphere of the game. Something we can listen to and work on as the game evolves in the early stages to its first prototype. 

I've attached two of my first songs, ever, missteps and all, in the attachments. The first one is a week into learning this instrument, the second is about 2 1/2 weeks into learning how to play. Just to get an idea of what this instrument sounds like. 

In the future I'll do more of these updates as I master it.

I'm still adjusting to a world post New California entering BETA. FNC's release to the public was met with mixed reactions -- mostly positive, some vehemently negative -- and it didn't ultimately achieve its aim of serving as a way to bolster my resume for getting a job that starts a healthy chapter in my career leading to making my own games with more people and more money.

The idiom was, "if you can do this with no money, imagine what you could do with money!"

It turns out the answer to that is, "come back when you've shipped a million dollar title." :p

You shouldn't live your life trying to impress people. It doesn't help.

No one is ever going to give you anything because you've "earned it" or "deserve it" no matter how hard you work or how competent you become. 

At the end of the day, everything you achieve in life will be something you conquered and made happen, not something that just comes to you -- even if you did your best to accomplish something that's tangential to that goal, you still need a product you can sell with no one's permission to an audience that asked for it. 

If you're going to make a game the hard way, the fully indie route with no financing, do it because you believe in it. You know there is an audience that wants what you are creating. Not to chase a trend, but to create something new and inspiring. 

That is hard. Possibly the hardest thing there is. You have to do it alone, and there is no cavalry coming to save you at some later stage in development. It's just you. From pre-pro to launch day and beyond..

And not every attempt will be a success. Trust me, I made FNC for 9 years, and it ate my life. I won some great achievements and awards, but ultimately just like everyone else, I'm starting from scratch on a new game. 

Every new game is your first game, whether it's your 2nd or your 40th. Getting started is quite the process, and it unfolds in unexpected ways that are a new challenge every time.

You should as an indie dev always be looking for ways to maximize value in shorter, quickly created and iterated material. Do not create shovel-ware that is started and released in a week or two, but even within your 5 year long development cycle on your large indie RPG, you should compartmentalize features and content generation in such a way that you can rapidly iterate and not get so tied down to asset creation pipelines and the fragility of your complex features that you can't keep iterating. 

If you find yourself spending months on one feature, it'd better be building more modules onto the core, not one module. You shouldn't spend more than a few days to a few weeks on each of those modules. You need to get  iterating and revising almost from the first draft of the prototype. Just keep building and changing until you find the pillar and its hooks.

Or in my case, ensure that your writing doesn't get stuck in 3 phases of life (your mid 20s, late 20s, early 30s) and come out with three distinct quality layers that don't jive. You need to start and close projects within your skillsets before moving on. And just keep moving.

Fail early. Fail often. Recover from it and keep iterating. 

That's the path to making something great. Just keep iterating and evolving and testing the latest build. 

Don't get complacent, and don't cement things in until they are getting consistent approval. And don't get burned out to the point you start just phoning it in to get it done. That's never good.

Just always be learning and discovering, and keep empowering those you work with to push past the resistance, and achieve more. 

You will get ahead, eventually. It may not be today. But you'll get there. 

The same people who looked down on you before will look down on you in the end. But you'll bury them in more numerous supporters. 

It just takes time, and not every day needs to be the best day.