Been a while
I dunno, I haven’t had time for blogging. Well not really at any rate. I’ve been working on a phone game that I can’t say much about (as you’ve seen previously) and learning the popcap framework.
As far as the thousander club goes, i’m not totally out of it. It’s just marking down my hours (although maybe productive to see how much time I do spend) for the club isn’t an accomplishment, at least for me. I was talking to a friend about it an appearently he viewed the idea as a skill one would learn by tracking down the hours for it. Say learning to draw, or improving one’s handwriting. Since the original article (and I don’t remember where it is now) talked about how much time it took to master a subject (something like 10000 hours), writing down my hours about my work just isn’t doing anything. Yeah i’m going to become a master at accomplishing my own work :-) This is not to say that for some people there may be some merit. As far as a thousand “things” (game ideas, free low-poly models, etc) that’s a good thing to shoot for so I wouldn’t say my comments have any bearing on that. Because they’re setting goals for their specific things and it makes sense. But me just including “all game development work” and the hours I take up doing that doesn’t really serve a purpose.
So i’m sort of on hiatus as far as that goes for now. I have a job that’s going to take one possibly two months, so then after that I think i’ll return to the thousander club. (I want to improve my handwriting, so i’m thinking 1000 hours to be expert at good handwriting is a good goal for the thousander club).
I was also working on a video project. Wherein I was editing the Lord of the Rings (extended versions 12+ hours) into a single 2 hour movie. Well i’ve made decent progress in this reguard, got about 50 minutes down to about 16-18 minutes (not exactly that but roughly a little better than 2-1 in time in minutes), however I have had to postpone that until I get this particular job done. Considering there’s been a few others that have done Lord of the Rings edits and even one case of combining them into a single movie, I figure that i’m not going to be ahead of the game anyways. Generally an editing project like this is for myself where I can learn the ins-and-outs of movie editing. If you can take a movie compress the time down into a fraction and then still have the whole movie read well (important parts still intact) then I figure you could become really good at movie editing. And when you finally got to edit a real project you would have a good handle on what is superfluous and what is not. (I’ve heard George Lucas was an editor-at-heart, he used to edit his first movies until he grew his empire and supposedly he learned in a documentary style and used images for alot of stuff — this is why his later works are so image heavy reguardless of what you think of his storytelling ability, but I digress)
Enchanted Lands is also put on hold. When you’re trying to earn money it takes precedence over your own work sometimes, but i’m cool with that, EL will continue at a later date. I suppose Hypno-Joe will too, i just haven’t disciplined myself to draw/animate while watching movies (and I know the answer would be not to watch anymore movies but I have my reasons and I don’t really care to expound on them - and I mean literally don’t care it would take too long and this post is just long enough as it is.)
Eventually i’ll too get back to blogging :-) Until then one has to just wait, assuming there’s at least a single reader left :-)
Keith
June 6th, 2006 at 6:05 am
I’m still here. B-)
As for the Thousander Club, I think next year I’ll pick a very specific skill to work on. I agree that 1,000 hours of “anything related to game development” isn’t quite how the thousand hours is supposed to work.
On the other hand, “anything related to game development” is what I need to do. While I could focus on programming in C++ for one year, and using the Gimp the next, and so on, I want to try to make a game using all of these skills now. It helps me to see where I am lacking (for example, audio work and integration), as well as where I have improved greatly. I’m a much stronger programmer now than I was last year at this time, but I’m also a little better at using the Gimp to make 2D art. Making a game isn’t a single skill, but a combination of skills. My Thousander Club goal is geared towards improving my ability to make games, and in that sense I think I am fine.
Of course, I don’t count my day job towards my thousand hours, but I feel that the hours aren’t representative of what I know now. I’m getting quite a bit of practice that isn’t getting reported. The Thousander Club seems to have become a way of tracking how much time I spend working on my own projects as opposed to how I spend the rest of my life.
As for everything else, I have also noticed that I am trying to do a lot of things at once. It is incredibly tiring to not finish the things you’ve started. Just yesterday I managed to get a lot of things done at my day job, and I found that I was feeling a lot better about myself. I need to start thinking about what I do outside of my day job and figure out what I could put off for now and what I need to focus on.
Good luck to us both. B-)
June 6th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
Thanks for hanging on ;-)
I guess the thousander club is really what you want it to be. I don’t know if I want Scott Hsu-Storaker to take down my “entry” on his thousander club list but I might have him reset it in about a month.
Actually i’d really ultimately like to do what you suggested, i’d like to spend a year on each skill becoming expert in it, but financially not feasible. But who knows if I make enough money to live off for a year I might take a year off after making that money and spend it learning a particular skill that helps me in making games, and then make an improved game the next year after with the new skill.
Keith