The Creative Process #18 - New Year, New Project

It’s the season for retrospectives and plans for forging into 2024 newly minted. This year has been A Lot, so I’m reaching the end of it through dogged momentum rather than a brisk wind in my sails.

I am creatively happy, which I think is the main takeaway of 2023.

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2023

A monstrous chunk of my year was devoted to my IF Comp game, Hand Me Down. It was my primary focus all year. I used a significant amount of leave to write it. I organized alpha tests and rewrites. My family planned outings so that I could squeeze in some extra development time.

It was — by sheer hours — most of 2023.

I achieved my goal of starting and finishing a project that other people saw. It did reasonably well in the competition (17th) and after some judicious choosing of prizes, ended up being quite cash-positive for me, even after accounting for commissioning art.

Hand Me Down wasn’t the entirety of my 2023, thankfully. I squeezed in some 3D art around the edges. In January, whilst isolating with COVID-19, I made Flood, a picture inspired by floods in Korea.

There was a bunch of things I liked and learned from this image, although I would do it differently now.

I continued my — is it a tradition if I’ve only done it once? — tradition of making a Christmas-themed 3D image. This one was okay on first draft but markedly better in second draft.

I have an idea for my next 3D piece, inspired by a toy my son got for Christmas, but I’ll see how it goes.

I feel I have used all the creative fuel in the tank this year, which is good. Other energies were burnt on a cavalcade of problems that all seemed to be a dice roll between trivial or devastating impact to our family, with vague but potentially sudden deadlines. We dodged or weathered them all, but boy, we could have done without them.

Between 2023 and 2024

Our Christmas was a mix between The Usual Thing and New Things due to how things shook out between the families. We did the traditional Anglo-Australian Christmas roast lunch with my in-laws which was delicious and pleasant (thanks mostly to my wife!) but we did it a few days early. On Christmas Day itself our little family went to a winery for lunch which was hit-and-miss (thanks entirely to the winery who did not earn the extravagant amount of money we paid them). Our family friend let us share a holiday home up in the mountains, which was fantastic.

Around that I managed to get Talos Principle 2 working on Linux and I’ve been solving puzzles and feeling like a genius. My review so far: if you liked the first game, you’ll like the second. It’s a weird mix of being outstanding design and minor irritations that loom larger because the rest of the game is so good. For example, instead of Ye Olde Cramped Testing Laboratory that games like Portal might have, the puzzles are distributed across massive, picturesque landscapes. This means you’re not plowing through puzzles like you’re eating popcorn chicken, but the occasional environmental puzzle will require a lot of trudging between remote outcrops.

The writing is very interesting, but has a peculiar aspect of everyone mostly agreeing with you, or at least seeing your perspective and not pushing back on it too hard. No-one (as far as I can tell) actively opposes you except for the puzzles, who seem glad that you solve them. There’s a lot of character and world-building… but then I just wanna solve puzzles. It’s given me a lot to think about for my future project Puzzle University.

On this New Year’s Eve, we’re not doing anything special. We have two kids that go to sleep at 7pm and two parents who collapse exhausted by 7:30pm. Braving the crowds to see fireworks has no big value.

2024

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. I do like the idea of yearly themes, as promoted by the Cortex podcast. However the past few years I’ve struggled to get a good theme. In 2023 I didn’t have a theme as such, except for “Finish Hand Me Down” in 144pt bold font.

I’ll think more about a 2024 theme, but nothing is an obvious candidate at the moment.

I’ve been making preparations for my next creative project, an interactive fiction game called Anne of the Green Cables, a cyberpunk adventure. Apart from listening to the audiobook and reading slowly through the paperback of the original story, I’ve been brainstorming with ChatGPT with the new voice chat capability. On the drive to work I can discuss ideas and have it bounce them back to me. More than anything, it’s improving my ability to think of ideas and convey them vocally before the speech-to-text thinks I’ve stopped speaking and cuts my thought process off.

Santa brought me an art book of Cyberpunk 2077, which is nice inspiration, although I suspect I might flirt with more biopunk or solarpunk styles for my game. I’m starting to piece together a world and characters, but am struggling with a plot.

I suspect with a plot in hand, I might be able to complete the project much, much quicker than Hand Me Down especially since I feel like this project might work best in hypertext (Twine) rather than parser (TADS 3). This gives me the opportunity to get it completed earlier and have a much more in-depth testing phase. I was inspired by some of the very polished work in IF Comp 2023, and I’d like to present something nice and smooth for 2024.

Otherwise I’ll continue with my experiments and slow build of Puzzle University. I haven’t committed any puzzles to the game, but I’ve been examining the design of a wide variety of puzzles, from Talos Principle 2, to puzzle hunts, to the GCHQ Puzzle book. I want to aim the difficulty a little bit lower than some of these examples, but I want to provide a decent meal for a puzzle enthusiast of whatever calibre.

I’m also working on a post-comp version of Hand Me Down. There’s no rush, but also no end of little things I could buff and polish.

I want to continue with 3D art, but that’s just a fun way to develop skills. For Christmas my wife got me the promise of a 3D printer, and I’ll explore making real-world things with that. Maybe 2024 is when I realise I’m a 3D-printing guy and this newsletter becomes long exegeses about the pitfalls of ABS plastics. Maybe not.

I continue to kick around the idea of some sort of website game. I dip in and out of Kingdom of Loathing, and have stumbled across Farm RPG. I also look at Adventure Snack admiringly and wonder if I could do something similar. I have an idea in my back pocket for this, but am not convinced I have something that I could complete. I’m still 100% committed to making projects to finish, rather than my old issue of projects floating along forever.

You the Reader

Do you have any creative projects planned for 2024? Any yearly themes or mountains you intend to climb?