The Creative Process #22 - The Value of Freedom

The last few months have been busy. Regular busy and creativity busy - work and family have been hectic, but I’ve also been pinballing into a stochastic orbit around my next big creative project. I’ve starting to believe I have something tangible to work on, but my attention gets torn this way and that, turning a loose attention into an annoying tension. I’m anxious to work on something sizable, but haven’t had much of a chance to. Last newsletter I talked about the advantages of constraints, but sometimes the walls can close in if things are too busy, too constrained.

But the solution to that was to drop everything and take the family to New Zealand.

Some time last year, while my wife was wrestling with her own hectic life tensions, she got hit by a stray advertisement for cheap flights, and the rest was history. We had vague plans all the way up to a few weeks beforehand. We nudged each other to get some essentials like, you know, an itinerary and accommodation.

Then there was a frantic whirlwind of trying to fit the vast infrastructure required to support a young girl and a just-recently walking boy. Somehow we got it into three bags, two backpacks, a backpack carrier and two car seats. After a gruelling and very early morning trudge through the airport, we were on our way.

Our trip was to the beautiful south island, specifically Christchurch and surrounds. We had eight days, a big SUV and realistic plans for seeing a bit of the place, but so much as to be in the cacophany of two kids in a tired tantrum.

Baggage

As a traveller, I always check in luggage. I can’t broker whatever Faustian deal is required to travel with only a tiny carry-on. I just can’t.

I’m also someone who has never had much luck with doing anything on laptops. I brought an iPad and a Kindle, but they weren’t really for me.

I did bring my commonplace book, some writing paper and my favourite Pentel Side FX mechanical pencil. Before we left I was itchy to get some projects done.

But, to be honest, I didn’t write anything down on my whole trip.

What was more valuable was to spend the time with my family, see some incredible scenery, eat delicious food, stop my son from wandering into trouble, and read books to my daughter. In the back of my mind, the clerks were cleaning up the creativity room. They were packing away the half-sketched ideas, dismantling the energetic plans for Yet-Another-Project-That-Won’t-Take-Long-I-Promise, and generally tidying up. This clean up effort was carried along marvellously by long relaxing floats in hot springs, followed up a few rounds on the trippy water slides.

I’ve also been on the lookout for a new 3D image to make, and was coming up empty in recent months. On the trip we saw a wonderful trail of fairy houses, and I’m inspired to make an image in Blender as a homage to that.

Christchurch is a fascinating city, devastated by earthquakes over a decade ago, but using that destruction as a way to embrace a new artistic city identity. Down the road from buildings that are still cracked and covered in graffiti, you might find an architectural wonder made of curved metal and glass. I loved all the murals tucked around the city.

Oh, and I got to eat a hot dog delivered by a system of pneumatic tubes. Winning.

While travelling with two little kids is its own genre of exhaustion, I returned to Australia both tired and refreshed. Now that the dust is settling, I can plan out a little creative work without all the frayed energy from before.

A Creative Break

I now have a little routine of taking a few weeks leave every so often to work on creative projects and those annoying house tasks that would only get done if everyone stopped saying, “Dad” every five minutes. I am very lucky to have a good amount of leave, but also a wife who groks the value of these breaks even more than I do. She tempers my expectations and always helps clear the calendar for me. Muses are important, but managers even more so.

I’m planning to soon have another mini-creative sabbatical. My primary focus will be Anne of the Green Cables. The project is taking shape and I have a few ideas to exploit the significant amount of time afforded to me. I can’t tell if I have a lot or a little time to complete the game before IF Comp 2024. I’m not as driven towards that goal as I was for Hand Me Down.

I have, however, been yearning for some gaming time, like I used to have years ago. Nowadays I just squeeze in a game of Rift Wizard 2 in between catching up on my usual Youtube haunts or short seasons of geeky TV shows.

I’ll have to watch the balance. Not too much creative “work” and risk burnout. Nor too much gaming and risk turning into a potato. Freedom is important, but you don’t want to get stuck at the extremes.

Recommendations

I wasn’t totally disconnected in New Zealand. I have a few recommendations:

• Autumn Chen released Social Democracy, an interactive fiction game where you try to stop Adolf Hitler taking power in the late 1920s. It is tough, but really well made.
• I found a chill creative game for my daughter: SUMMER HOUSE. You put prefab bits together to build houses. There is a slight Japanese feel to it. I like making 7-11 convenience stores with it. My daughter likes making triple-story houses with cats on the eaves.
• The Rosebush is a fantastic online magazine for interactive fiction. One of my life’s ambitions is to write a good article for it. The Rosebush did a great article this month on the influence of the Neo Interactives’ game jams. I mentioned the Neo Interactives last month and they continue to do great work at a breathless pace.
• Rift Wizard 2 is out. It is a great tweak to the original gameplay of slowly building up a specialty wizard as you explore dark rifts. Curiously though, the general approach I brought to the first game is readily dashed upon rocks in the second. I almost gave up on it as it seemed too hard. You have to adopt a more reactive, impromptu approach, I find, rather than the approach you might use in the first game of thinking of a goal build at the start and choosing everything according to that. My best run so far was a janky fire-and-arcane-based that somehow spawned a swarm of fire beasties whenever I launched attacks. Unfortunately I got cocky and roasted by some Watchers upon stepping into a new level, but still I had fun.