I’ve had a rough couple of days, writing-wise.
Lately I’ve been super excited that one of my friends will soon be launching a Kickstarter campaign for a video game project (The Witch Cult) he’s been working on for quite some time. Michael has done what I’m trying to do this year — taken time off full-time employment to try to make a living pursuing his own creative endeavours.
I’ve wanted to play around with video game creation myself for quite some time. I’ve got a few pages worth of notes for several game ideas that honestly haven’t really progressed past the ‘ideas’ phase. It’s been my intention to use some of my ‘other project’ time to start learning some more C# coding and play around with game engines, just to explore the possibility, but as you can imagine seeing the impending hopeful success of a friend has sparked my interest. On Friday, I downloaded the latest version of Unity and loaded up some tutorial courses I’d bought at a steep discount last year. I have done very little else since then, only taking a little time out to hug my partner and attend a regular roleplaying session on Sunday.
First, I was surprised just how much I remembered about C# programming, given I’d only half-done a course on it several years ago. I just needed some reminders here and there, and I got back into it pretty easily. Mostly everything makes sense, and I found myself getting pretty impatient during quite a few of the tutorial videos as they were just teaching me stuff I either already knew or could have worked out with a few minutes experimenting/Googling rather than sitting through a half-hour video of having it slowly explained.
Second, holy cow Unity is really, really easy to get into. I mean, obviously the hard work when making a game is building assets from scratch, more complex coding stuff, and the degree of polish that you want to put in, but I was really amazed at how easy and fast it is just to, you know… throw something together and have it work. I have a much better understanding of why hundreds upon hundreds of uselessly bad shovelware games exist now — they exist because it literally just takes a couple of hours for one person to make one. It exists for the same reason as the metric tons of terrible fanfic exists.
So yeah, the last few days have been terrible for writing, but good for learning Unity and C#. I figure that isn’t a bad thing — my goals and schedule allow for time where the equivalent of basically nothing gets done, so I’m still well inside my parameters, and while I’ve got the inspiration and drive to learn it seems like it’d almost be wasteful not to explore it. Still, I gets guilt and anxiety over it because I get guilt and anxiety over basically everything that I do, ever.
I’m currently working on a little sort of play around thing to test out all the bits I’m learning. It’s basically junk, but I might upload it at some point just to say ‘lookit this thing I done’.
Just need to be careful not to drop too much cash in the asset store. There’s just so much shiny in there…
