I’ll do it on monday!

Today I just did about 2 more hours with the stuff i’m doing for DroidArena.

Total to date : 13 hours.

I realize i’ll have a bunch of little short posts like this, but it’s really the only way I can keep track of my hours, I can’t really be bothered with writing them down somewhere and saving them up until a weekly post. So i’ll post when I do them, and not when I don’t.

Keith

Welp got in 2 more hours for a total of, drumroll please, ELEVEN! whoo

11/1000 so far neat eh?

I also managed to get 2 hours in on my 100 hour challenge, but I will detail that later when I update enchanted lands.

I can’t guarantee alot of time because this week i’m cleaning house (literally). Next week hopefully i’ll be back on the 9-5 experiment, until then, stay tuned.

Keith

Today I got my root canal and tooth filled in.  That was fun.  On a lighter note I managed to do this little bit of art based on a thread in the indiegamer dev forums.

Keith

Okay I’ve decided to challenge myself. When thinking, discussing, and writing about Enchanted Lands I asked myself, how long should it realistically take to make an epic game such as this. Of course the answer is like years. Then I asked myself, well what takes so long, and the answer came to me ‘content’.

Yep, content. All the animations or full motion video, the sound, the music, everything else but the game itself. Sure the game can take a long time. But take all of that extraneous stuff away, and you realize it shouldn’t take that long at all. That is if you’re into telling stories of any kind.

So i’m thinking, okay, if I could belt out a big epic game, on a small time frame how long would I take. And it comes back to me, 100 hours! I know doesn’t seem like alot. However I can write up a storm in a hundred hours. I bet I could finish a novel. Of course that’s just a simple linear narrative, compared to the interactiveness of a game!

So this is the challenge. I will spend 100 hours, I will make all the stories for all the characters, all the puzzles, the maps, and implement it in an adventure game creation engine. Herculean you say? definately, Impossible? Maybe not. I’ll have a completely working game in the crudest of fashions. Relatively little-to-no art. Just enough to tell the story I want to tell. This is the sort of challenge that motivates me. If I don’t finish it, no frets because I will have done more than I ever dreamt I could do. Then all I will have to do is content. Only with the game done i’ll have a roadmap by which to create the content, for the ultimate adventure gameplaying experience!

What do you think?

Previously: Enchanted Lands : Enchanted writers block.
Keith

Mr. Scott Hsu-Storaker - proposed a challenge in his blog post entiteld “The Road Ahead in Aught-Six”.  In this challenge he challenged people to work on something for 1000 hours.  I guess there was another article about practicing for 10000 to become an expert, and he figured that 1000 would still be enough to get good in.  So for my thousander club participation I devote 1000 hours this year to work on my game projects.  So far i’ve only got 9 hours logged in, but that will soon change.  I’m going to propose in my next post on my game Enchanted Lands a 100-hour experiment, about getting a whole game done.  I’ll detail it there later however instead of in this post, but stay tuned!

Keith

Actual day 14, only got a couple of hours done.  So I guess I can add that to my whopping running total of 9 hours for the Thousander Club — I promise to get something working better on monday.

Keith

I didn’t happen to do anything on day 12.  I probably shouldn’t make a post for it, however I did for day 13.  Spent 7 hours, I guess that’s 7 to 1000 which means I have 993 more hours to go to be in the “thousander” club, or to say i’ve completed it.

Today would have been day 14 but I called it as a day off.  I was going through some coins i’ve had in a bank ever since I was 2.  My parents were saving it up for me.  And now 28 years later (i’m 30), I open it up hoping to find something valuable.  Of course there wasn’t really much that was valuable.  It amounted to about 20 bucks.  In any case.  I’m not counting today.

Keith

Sorry to say i’ve not done much today.  I stayed up too late at night last night.  I’m trying to change my schedule.  Luckily I still have till wednesday to officially start.  So if I mess up again tommorow it’s okay, but if I mess up wednesday, well let’s just say I won’t mess up wednesday.  I’ll be logging my hours for the thousander club as well.

Well i’ve been tossing around ideas and typing them up. I have an idea for a half-breed wizard, and my friend Seth Robinson says “named Harry Potter” - well I wasn’t even thinking of that at all. The idea stems from the fact that i think there will be humor in a wizard that can only do halfway spells, that is literally halfway. So I throw the idea of the half-breed out, and then just that half of his powers were stolen. Okay, now then I go back into the idea that our main character the long lost Prince, gets sent to the mines, and eventually leads slave revolt. The idea of being sent into a mind was, as my brother reminded me, similar to King’s Quest 6. In fact I keep finding alot of parallels, makes it hard to write a good story that’s non-derivative. In any case I decided to write down the main story as a set of points. Coresponding to various plot points (which will turn into cut scenes) — Here is is

Main Story:

A true magic kingdom makes it’s living out of tourism. With news of the king and queen dead and
the administrators trying to figure out who will rule, the kingdom falls into a slump. Things start closing up, like the wizards, fairy godmother, princess, and knight’s acadamies. Eventually people stop coming.

Inciting Incident:

The king and queen is mysteriously killed. The Prince disappears. And the administrators shut
down Enchanted Lands.

Plot point 1:

Two schools are activated again, the Knights Acadamy and Fairy Godmother training. However in the knights acadamy, they’re training with real weapons, not the kind used on a magical vacation and the fairy godmother school won’t let anyone leave who joined previously. There are rumors of a person who was banished for enslaving people to work in his quicksilver mines the magical mineral that runs the realm. An outworlder shows up and helps a wizard find the prince.

Midpoint :

The guy that was banished has indeed returned, and has proclaimed himself king. Secretly he
tries to imbue magical properties onto non-magical people with the quicksilver. The outworlder
finds out he’s the missing prince and his parents were killed by the badguy.

Plot point 2:

the badguy succeeds in building an army. But is stopped by an army of citizens who are opposed
as well as the true king and heir.

Climax :

A big battle ensues, killing the bad guy.

Resolution :

The kingdom is safe again, and the new king is ruling.

I was attempting to distill the esence of the story into that, and to decouple the character stories from that main one. Each is trying to complete the main goal which is overcoming the bad guy. But they each do their part.

Well that’s all for today I guess.

Previously: Enchanted Lands - Final Overview

Keith

Nothing to speak of here, today I didn’t do much except work on Enchanted Lands story for a couple of hours. My batteries are acting up, I need some new rechargables.

This is just up so I have an entry for day 10. (5 per week)

Keith