For quite a while now I’ve been posting Gamer Diaries, free-form entries about the thoughts, feelings and observations I’ve had while playing the games I own as a motivation to get through my backlog. They’ve proven pretty effective as the feedback I get from people as they shared their own feelings and opinions about the games I’ve played, and it motivates me to keep playing and talking about more games.
For years I’ve wanted to make my own games, specifically, visual novels. I’ve always liked playing them and whenever some new, cool labor of love comes out, I always get motivated to start an idea...but then nothing ever comes of it except a doodle here and a messy .doc file there. I have lots of ideas, but I’m not much of a programmer, and I tend to be overly ambitious and invariably bite off more than I can chew, get side-tracked by something else, and then forget all about it.
With the SixTAY Day Article Challenge, I struggled to think of a theme of what my articles would be about, but recently I got inspired by fellow TAYer Subjustice and her recent work on her own visual novel game, Saucy Suitors. So I’ve decided to use the challenge, and my own Gamer Diary formula to finally get off my butt and FINISH a visual novel, start to finish.
I probably won’t get done in 60 days, but that’s a lot of time to get something, ANYTHING done. And it won’t be without its own obstacles, as currently I don’t have access to my digital art supplies: recent real life shenanigans preventing me from getting to my tablet, scanner, work computer and art software. But my BF, a software developer, has agreed to help me work out any kinks I run into with programming, and I plan to use RenPy, which is fairly idiot-proof. I scaled down my ideas from epic, subversive stories that will be groundbreaking uses of the medium, to something a bit silly and cute, something more accessible and when finished people will at least think ‘well, that was fun’.
So as I work on this challenge I hope people will give me feedback and encouragement, as I try to climb two hills at once: getting sixty articles done and working on a visual novel.
