9-5 Experiment - Day 3
Okay it’s not a total wash-out, but to tell you the truth I didn’t handle my time as effectively as I should have. Last night I went to bed late. This morning I still woke up early. I had done okay until my first “break”.
Originally I said I could put two hours I had planned to do before 9 instead push the start time back to 7 (as I get up at 6 am), and then meld each hour before 9 into each of the two 15 minute breaks resulting in 1:15 minute breaks. These aren’t breaks like you think. Yes I get away from the computer however, on one hand I clean for an hour (and still do the 15 minutes doing nothing or sitting or snacking or something), and the other I take my hour walk for exercise, that extra 15 minutes is devoted to getting ready to go.
In any case today while I was on my “cleaning break” I tried to scare up some music via internet radio. But it seemed to take my time to find what I wanted. I usually try for Christian rock music. But it’s hard to find as most of it is of the “easy listening” milk-toast for over-35 soccer mom type of christian music. And that’s perfectly fine if you’re that kind of person. But i’m 30, i’m male, and sometimes I like to rock out to the likes of Pillar, Relient-K, and others. You have some traditionalists who believe that rock music is bad for Christians. I happen to think we need to have that around for the kids/teens to listen to, just as long as it has the message of Christ’s Love. Anyways i’m getting sidetracked. To make a long story short, some of my cleaning time got cut down searching for the music.
The other concerns my walk break. Since I was in bed late, I was tired as all get out, and it gets even more tiring reading a dry c++ book. So I sort of dozed in my chair for about an hour, from 1:30 - 2:30, so I was late there. Today is my sis-in-law’s birthday so I walked over to the store, bought my sis-in-law some chocolate, walked over to my brother’s house, gave it to her, talk to them for a while, and then came back home, it was almost 4 or something. My dad was home, we were talking, so essentially I didn’t get alot of my work in today.
It’s okay, the important thing is I didn’t surf the web, or play games, or anything, and still “worked” as-it-were. I did get my c++ program done today, that ended chapter 2 of this book. So I still have 2 days to get through chapter 3 to be back on schedule as far as that goes. As far as Hypno-Joe, today I continued reading docs for the SGDK. So I guess I won’t be animating him this week. Maybe I won’t get that small part done this month. By the month I wanted the tutorial done and hypno animated walking and in the SGDK just walking around. Who knows though there’s still almost 2 weeks left.
As far as Enchanted Lands, I decided on a new way to work on the story(stories). Well in a movie you have the various plot points, you have the inciting incident that gets it all into motion, you have plot point 1 which starts to take the story in a new direction, midpoint which totally changes direction, plot point 2 which turns again, climax (big battle scene) and resolution (marrying the princess or whatever happy ending), inbetween inciting incident and plot point 1 you usually have character introductions and maybe subplots introduced. At plot point 2 usually (at least in Lucas and Spielberg movies) the good guys somehow end up on the wrong end of the rope, essentially they get beat for lack of a better word, before the climax which is the good guy finally regaining himself (or herself) and winning. Okay so that’s in a movie, but this is INTERACTIVE I hear you yell. Indeed, this goes back to my string-of-pearls method of storytelling and interactive game play. Actually I got the idea for the string-of-pearls method by watching the movie “The Rock” with Nicolas Cage, where he opened the missle with the chemical weapon in the famous “string of pearls” configuration. Essentially each ball was connected by a string (or like a string) as if they were pearls on a necklace. Anyways back to the game. The method goes like this. I write the plot points down and they become the basis for cut scenes. Then I design the interactivity inside the “pearls” as-it-were, to get from one end of the “string” to the other. How you get from one cinematic to the next is how you define your game play in the adventure game. So that’s it, starting tommorow i’m going to write those up for the main characters, display them in the blog, then start working on maps where they interact, then i’ll work from there.
Keith