Progress Update - January 2021

 I think this was inevitable.

It's one thing to tear apart a game. The entire thing is like a puzzle; I can pull out each individual piece, examine it, take a lot of notes, and put that piece in a box for later. I can break the piece down into the bits that comprise it, the process it was made out of, and identify every single limitation that was placed on it. I can even start making a new piece to slot back into the same slot.

It's another thing entirely to put the game back together. Games are built in a completely different way than you would build a physical device. Every single thing that exists is something that only works in your head. There are no properties to the game until we actually define what a game is. Even using another game as an example, we can make changes to the end result that turn the result into something unrecognizable.

...

Trying to put anything into words is difficult. I keep using analogies to try and relate what I'm currently experiencing to something concrete and real. That way of doing things has served me well until recently, where everything seems to be going right in a lot of ways that I never expected to happen. Today feels completely different than a month ago, and I think that's a good thing. Difficult words still mean the words come out instead of getting jammed somewhere and buried so deep that they can't come out.

I am finding myself with an abundance of time. A lot has improved in my life lately. I feel like everything I know has upended itself and I've been wandering around scattering pieces of thoughts and ideas around for so long that I lost track of where I wanted to go. It's hard to explain exactly what has happened... it feels like I can think now, and anything that I want to do gains 100% of my attention. I have been putting in maybe 30% until recently.

30% isn't right. 30% is all I had. I was spending so much time trying to figure out my problems, fix everything in my life, and move out of my absolute hell that was a series of migraines and sleep deprivation that led to more migraines and sleep deprivation, I didn't have time for anything else. My other hobby is giving me a lot of hope for moving forward. Let's focus on this one for awhile.

I don't just want to gather up my thoughts. That's all I've been doing for the past few years. Instead, I want to make new and exciting experiences and entire worlds out of the ideas that I've simply ignored for so long. I want to take other people's works that are both wonderful and terrible and make them into something great. I want to create a system that can work with all of that, and to build upon it in the coming months.

There's a lot of designs I have stored in scattered files, fragmented and disorganized. Let's turn those into a fully fleshed out design document. Heck, let's overdesign the entire thing so that way any game that wants to come into being can just pull parts out of the design and ignore the rest.

Some of the design already has working code. The code has more structure to it than loose files, but like everything else I've done for the past few years it's unfocused, unpolished, and hidden. I'd like to build a game on this system. Maybe ten. Who knows; I'm not one to pick anything and go halfway with it.

...

I'm not sure how I'm going to organize a design page yet. I have been putting off doing this for awhile; peeking into my creative process is something that I am not too keen on sharing, but it's better than languishing on the sideline or "suddenly pineapples" happens.

The end goal is to remake Alisia Dragoon. How do we get there? Plans. Lots of creativity. Lots of effort. Lots of love. A bit of snark and a blog to document it all.