It's just been nonstop, screwball comedy hijinx day and night here in the secret laboratory, if by "nonstop etc." you mean working constantly for months at a stretch on something so huge that even months of work don't make a dent in it.
It's my own fault, of course; last year I carried out a plan that was meant to give me lots of time to spend on a project of my own – after many years of day jobs in which I spent my time and mojo on Other People's Dreams, or possibly, on Other People's Schemes, or - most likely -on both.
So I shuffled through the stacks of stuff in the Idea Closet and what fell on me there was one of my very favorite ideas – a comic book project called "Empire State Patrol". shop.webomator.com/EmpireState… It's intended for print, if a publisher likes that idea – but failing that I'm also doing some things with it that would work well online. Honestly, though, print is still the place to be, although it'll still get its own web site with previews and production updates and even a trailer, when it's ready.
So anyway, I knew it was huge when I started but knowing that the project was huge was more or less like knowing that the ocean is wide. I mean, you get it, you realize that it's a long way to the other side, but you still don't see it on that personal level that you attain when somebody throws you in and tells you to swim across the damn thing . There are good days and there are bad days, but, you know, you just have to keep swimming.
There's an irony here that I do appreciate. One of the things that led me out of the games business was that projects were now so huge that:
1.) very little innovation happens, due to the enormous amounts of time and money that are involved;
2.) People With Money end up making all of the decisions, including the ones pertaining to #1; and
3.) you just never see a small, committed group of people turning out something interesting any more. The cost and the time required make that almost impossible.
So what did I do? I started working on something that I have to admit is every bit as large as a game project, but which I'm doing by myself.
This is probably why I'm not widely recognized as a deep thinker.
I think it's going to be neat, though!
ShopDreamUp AI ArtDreamUp
Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual
I've been working for the last several months on a project called Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, and it's just (finally!) launched. Thrilling Tales is a series of (densely) illustrated and (lightly) interactive stories from the retro future that can be read in their entirety at the web site (for free!) or purchased as full color books (not for free!). There are also some free downloads like desktop wallpapers and screen savers and, for the moment, a single diversion in the site's Derange-O-Lab. That's the Pulp Sci-Fi Title-O-Tron, a random pulp science fiction title generator.
The first Thrilling Tale is Trapped in the Tower of th
News from the Secret Laboratory
It’s been a busy Spring and Summer so far; but just about all the work I’ve been doing has been on my web sites, so there hasn’t been much to upload here. Last year I spent about nine months on a very large project – so large that even those months barely scratched the surface of it – and this year I’ve been trying to undo some of the resulting neglect of my commercial ventures. Since although I may be a shiftless layabout, I’m not a wealthy shiftless layabout.
Late last week I got distracted from what I ought to have been doing by a program that generates height maps, for realistic 3D terrain, and
Emanations from the Retrosphere
I know this is weird, but it's turned out that leaving the Day Job has left me even less time for DA lately.
Over the past couple of months I took a good look at what I was doing with my websites, then redesigned a couple, added a couple of new ones, and started thinking about them less as a series of projects and more like the parts of one system. That has kept my head pretty well buried in 'em for awhile but I think it was time well spent. It'd been actual years since I made any major changes at my personal site, for one, and it's the clip art pages there that draw more traffic than anything else I've got. Behold the power of free stuff
So Many Changes!
Well I haven't updated much here in weeks, and there's a reason for that. Actually a bunch of reasons. I think they're all good ones, though.
I've thrown off the yoke of my corporate masters, though as corporate masters go, they weren't so bad. In other words, I left the Day Job - I don't have any plans for returning to game production at all. That's a seventeen year long story, and I'd really rather do something else now.
So I am doing something else. I've moved to a small town in northeastern Ohio - a harbor town on Lake Erie that's practically on the border with Pennsylvania. I have a house here that's close to 100 years old and w
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Even a small time artist like me can acknowledge the points 1 - 2 and 3.
I really appreciate your efforts.
- Ahmed Nayyer
I really appreciate your efforts.
- Ahmed Nayyer