Helloooo, hope your week was as pleasant as is reasonably possible!
I started watching season 2 of “Old Enough!” on Netflix and I can’t recommend it enough, it’s a Japanese show where kids around 3 -5 years old go out on their first ever errand. They cry, struggle and go through stages of frustration and grief, then they come out the other side, success or failure doesn’t really matter, it’s the work. The work matters.
The doing of things.
Not lofty goals or things tied to our place in the universe, that comes later. The doing of regular things, chores and errands. The maintenance of your home, body and mind.
In my early twenties I used to struggle with motivation and consistency tremendously, until I watched a few too many Zen-Buddhist-type / Alan Watts lectures on YouTube (it’s a cliché but it worked for me) and started seeing myself as the kid I actually am.
I want chocolate, I want snacks and I want sugar. Treating myself the way they treat the kids on that show is what works for me, I tell myself the thing I want doing and then I let myself grieve all the time I’m gonna lose doing it when I could just be playing games and eating chocolate. Then, kicking and screaming, I watch myself go to the shop, go for a run or wait in a live chat queue to talk to the “parcel delivery” person who did not actually deliver the parcel.
Something I haven’t been doing
If you know me you probably know I like to make music, nothing major (pun intended). I’m not someone who had serious dreams of being a musician thankfully, so my instruments and little songs aren’t riddled with bitter demons angry at me for failing, but it is something I think of when I think of myself. I think I’m a person who makes games, bits of visual art and music when I feel like it, except I haven’t really made any new music in a long time.
I used to make a lot of lofi sampley stuff like the track below, but there was never a central theme that bound enough of them together to call it an “album”.
/assets/audio/vader-music.mp3
I’ve wrote dozens of acoustic songs but never actually released them, I’ve started many games and made tiny music tracks for them but nothing approaching a “Score”. I’ve done lots of the set-up, bought all the gear, everything… except actually make and finish stuff.
I’m trying to make this the year of learning how to finish things… we’ll see if I finish.
One album I love coming back to for inspiration is bird world by leon chang, it’s a video game album made for a video game that doesn’t exist, it’s fantastically layered with video game samples and incredibly good melodies.
I’ve started writing something similar several times but never gave it a solid go, I’d write one track like below, then pop it into a folder and never open it again.
/assets/audio/some-clouds-float.mp3
One really good excuse I have at the moment is that Wunderwurld is gonna need a whole music & sfx pass to make the MVP and actual playable demo feel good.
So that’s what I’ll do, a few short tracks that can be listened to for a while; a menu theme, a day theme, a night theme and maybe a shop theme. All with the flavour of Animal Crossing set in the Underworld.
What I did last week
So how did the last week go?
Overall pretty good, not everything on the list was finished but I managed to rough out a detailed MVP plan for Wunderwurld, still a bit of tweaking to do but it’s made me cut a bunch already and from here I can hone in on what systems are left, this makes planning out the leftover tasks far easier.
I have a basic shop implementation as well, you can buy / sell items, they restock the next day and I’ve started on the shopkeeper dialogue next, I’ll post something visual on next weeks update.
The hardest part of the last week was finding the time to keep doing a run everyday, I’m on 21 days now which google says is how long it takes for something to become a habit, apparently at 90 days it becomes “part of your lifestyle”, I don’t know what the difference is but that’s my next aim I guess.
I did practice a fair bit of guitar, my finger callouses are proof! I failed to read much of my book though, next week I’m gonna push for a few pages a day.
What I plan to do next week
I’m gonna be a little easier on myself next week because I want to relax a bit more.
So I’m aiming to;
Write a simple day theme for Wunderwurld, I’m not thinking of it being finished just a solid few mins that doesn’t grate to listen to for a while
Get the new 2D creatures Emily has arted in game, with their new “Family” category
Get another plant and it’s growth sprites drawn up and implemented
That’s pretty much it I think, stuff like guitar playing is on my daily tasks now so I keep up with it.
See you all next week!