There was a man walking against traffic, on the Calf's Robe bridge this morning, on Deerfoot. ON THE BRIDGE AGAINST TRAFFIC. I kept seeing all these people ahead of me slamming on the brakes out of surprise, and I get there and there's a dude carrying a trash bag, walking in the shoulder on the god damned bridge where you drive 100km/hr and is the most dangerous section of the most dangerous road in our city. That was about as good as the people riding bicycles on that road last year.
Then I get into work where my coworker was waiting to hear about the birth of her nephew. She got the news a few minutes ago and they named him "Ansible." Okay then. I fail to see how a baby translates to "faster than light messaging," but maybe it's a magic baby. Either way, we've been trying to figure out what his nick-names would be. Maybe he'll just go by his middle name...
While I wait for the world to inevitably come to an explosive end, I've been working a lot on writing and the RPG. I got an extended session in to work on the RPG last Saturday and I got A LOT done. I'm actually almost done the functional bits of the "Tutorial area" (the Office). And I know that sounds like tutorial as in showing you how to play, but really I mean tutorial in that I'm learning how to work with RPG maker and making things as silly as possible. Functionally, it's playable. There's a few elements that lead to dead ends or incomplete segments though, which is next on the list. I've also started to map out the next two level sections.
One thing I've learned is that all the dialogue and text I have pre-written ends up changing when I translate it to the screen.
If I could work regularly at the rate I worked last Saturday, I could be done a lot of this by the end of the year. That said, motivation, life circumstances and difficulty barriers will likely crop up. I want to see if I can have something playable for Extra Life this year so I can offer it as an incentive for Kathleen raising money. This game is intended to be for a small audience (mostly private), as there are a lot of assets like music that I wouldn't be allowed to use. That said, if I could create most of the assets myself, which is difficult, but I have the ability to do, AND could come up with a solution to the music, I could make this available to more people. I never intend to sell or market it though.
As for the writing...I've actually got a lot done there in that department. I've cranked out a lot of pages over the past two months, spending a lot of time downstairs on the couch keeping an eye on my puppy.
The downside to this productivity is video production has been reduced to a couple hours a week. In the past two weeks I've done little more than edit a little bit of Dishonored 2. I still have a massive repository of videos in the form of Pillars of Eternity, but even that will run out eventually and I will need to finish the game. The good news is a lot of the footage is there to work with, so now that I've set up my remote desktop, I can realistically work on this.
Lastly, in the past week we had the second session of Mesk's D&D campaign, in which I participated as an NPC character from the previous session. It again, went for a good 8+ hours, but I was able to stay to its conclusion (well mostly, I think Mesk did something extra with one of the characters afterwards). I also managed to voice (very terribly) all the lines as I played. I often neglected to voice my own lines though, mostly because I was focused on what I was typing. I think it went really well.
The session was as interesting and entertaining as the last, with more focus on plot advancement and character interaction than anything else. There were only a few opportunities for battle, some of which were talked their way out of...or escalated to the point where one of the characters tried to solo a boss (and then got interrupted when I sent a gundam in there cause I'd been waiting for that freaking robot to skewer someone all game). Speaking of robots, there was definitely some softcore robot love going on in this past session.
As for my first "real" roleplay (in that Nick and Shauna aren't around to forgive my terrible interactions with other characters and that it was not verbal), I think I did okay. I already know I wasn't GREAT and there was an incident where I had to move locations and it happened to be at the worst possible time (as my character was required for information), but I was WAYYYYY out of my comfort zone. This isn't something I've ever really done before, and a lot of these roleplaying or tabletop games have been forcing me to learn and try to get better at this.
It's definitely a rediscovery/retraining. It's something I think I had when I was kid when an old friend of mine and I would make up our own games and fantasy worlds. Then he left without notice and my new "crew" swiftly crushed those fantasies as they weren't too interested in those sorts of things. They also weren't afraid of voicing those opinions to my face. Since then I've been hardcoded to think things like roleplaying, writing and world building need to be kept a secret, and any failure to do so results in ridicule and embarrassment. So in my head I'm like, "yeah, this is cool and engaging" but you go deeper and all I hear is "you're making a fool of yourself." It's also an issue of "if you aren't good at it, or taken the time to get good at it privately, then don't even bother," which is a whole other clusterfuck that's built up over the span of a decade and only started to get broken down and rebuilt about 5 years ago. I care a lot less now about what people think, but it's the reason I get scared away from some things still. An example is when "you know *insert famous person here* has already done it right?" ended up translating to "someone better than you did it already so why bother trying?" in my head and I completely abandoned multiple hours of work on a project and never returned.
At least I'm learning a lot about myself. I guess that's why I have a lot of respect for these other players and the ease in which they jump into their roles. I enjoy watching them interact with the world and develop their characters/story. I know the campaign has been a lot of work for Mesk to run, but it's paid off in my opinion. Apparently there's a lot of people interested in joining, so I'll likely take on the role of various NPCs, which will probably be good training for me. Either way, I'm in for the other sessions, whether I'm watching/commentating or playing.
When I find out what Mesk wants to do with the D&D videos and what he wants to share of it, I'll likely post links to them in the blog.
PS - To my old friend, I doubt you're reading this, or ever will, but if you are, know I still have that house you built for my favourite toy. It's on display in my sitting area. I lost all the monster cards and that stick figure book though and that kills me a little.
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