The Creative Process #27 - The First Time

Spring is having a hard go at it this year. Normally Spring in my area of the country hits the first few days of September, lulls you into a false sense of security for about a week with warm air and sunshine, then goes icy cold for one week, and then when you’re battered and dazed from that, it proceeds into Spring Proper. It’s the yearly sucker punch.

But this year, things feel different. It feels like Spring is a washed-up slapstick comedian. He knows the usual beats, but his timing is off and he can’t quite pull off the same tricks like he used to. It’s confusing for everyone. Some days it’s bright and warm, but then turns cold and windy. It might dust my car with pollen, but then wash it off with rain.

Amidst all the irregular change of season, everything else in my creative sphere has been slightly off-rhythm. Although I think I’ve found a strategy through it all.

IF Comp 2024

The Interactive Fiction competition is well underway. There are 67 submissions and reviews have been coming out at a terrific pace.

My goal for this IF Comp was to review 12 pieces before the end in mid-October. I’m currently up to 7, although admittedly one of them is for the notorious and short Uninteractive Fiction. I’ve been posting my reviews on the Interactive Fiction forums. People seem to like them although there’s been a lot fewer responses from authors than I might have expected.

My personal approach is to not read anyone else’s reviews until I have played and reviewed a piece. And not rework my review afterwards! This second part is important — I’ve noticed the review zeitgeist being a bit different from my own perspective and wanted to course-correct, but I think it’s better to write from my first impressions.

I also try to be positive and fair to the author. This has been a tricky requirement, not because of the games, but just my month. I find that the ideal time to review is neither at the tippy-top of being creatively bubbling, optimism and rainbows all around, nor whilst slowly trudging through the brown, grey and purple sludge of life. It’s that middle part of the spectrum that is beige and pastel. Reasonable and level-headed. Hopeful, but not electric.

I’ve been envious of the other reviewers who have been able to blast out interesting reviews like a fire hose. But everyone’s situation is different.

Anne of Green Cables

My little dream is to give my next work-in-progress, Anne of Green Cables, an occasional splash of art, to elevate it a little. I thought I could have a few of these done whilst writing my game. No, it seems like an exclusive-OR — I can write my game or I can do art, but either will be slow.

While I got some writing done this month, most of my efforts have been towards one piece of 3d art. Blocking out a shot and then filling it in is a lot more work than I had hoped.

The idea of the shot is a picture of a cyberpunk cityscape, with contrasting elements of a floating farm (where Anne lives) and a skyscraper (where the bad guys are). I had a hero element of the skyscraper (a complicated nest of geometry nodes), blocks for stand-ins for buildings, and a few blocks for the floating farms. The first attempt at framing looked like this:

I liked the verticality but the eventual noise and scale of the scene would be terrible. I asked some artists and they suggested bringing the camera to somewhere more realistic than five hundred meters in the air.

I was really focussing on rule-of-thirds for the alignment of elements, so this looked a little better. It was still a bit floaty, so I wrangled it again.

This felt a lot better. More sky allowed for better silhouettes and focus. You can see I started making procedural buildings, as well as a procedural corn field and hand-wrangled Green Gables-like house.

To play around with some of the lights and silhouettes, I’ve put in a sky, a shore in the foreground, and minimal lighting.

It’s far too dark at the moment, but I find it’s easier to add light and contrast than take it away. I also have an idea of the bounce lighting from the water; look at the farm block to the far right, and how the super-bright corn field lights splash out to its edge. The sky was a test but looks fantastic.

So little by little I’m building up this scene. There’s a real balance between me loving elements and hating elements (sometimes the same elements!) My final goal is “decent amateur”.

A funny side effect of owning the entire project is that you can thwart yourself with the best of intentions. I was doing the 3d art and spent a little time creating the corn field. But then in my writing, the floating farms needed to be more cyberpunk-y and thus vertical farms. Despite what you might think, stalks of corn are not vertical farms. Back to the 3d drawing board!

Human Creativity

I got to play Tiny Glade this month. It’s a beautiful diorama game, written in Rust. Using some very intuitive controls, you draw and stretch elements of buildings and castles to make up a little scene.

The controls reminded me of Spore and the Sims. If it seems like you should grab a wall and pull it out, then you can. The game adds in little details like ladders, sheep or ducks depending on the elements you’ve added.

I’ve been playing Creative mode Minecraft with my daughter. Allowing her to do her own thing has been harder than I thought. She hasn’t got WASD down. She gleefully dove into underground caverns and found a lost temple, and proceeded to break it up. In all my years of playing Minecraft I’ve never seen one, and would never just TNT a wall “just because”. She enjoys it and likes it when I steal away in the night to build some cool new thing.

I’m about to introduce her to The Sims 4, which might be also up her alley and maybe a bit slower-paced. I definitely want to encourage computer familiarity and creativity, and these seem like good games to try. I’m a bit shocked at the price tag on the Sims DLC, but I haven’t been in EA’s orbit for years.

I hang out with a bunch of IF types who also do art, some just learning, some quite skilled. mathbrush, IF reviewer extraordinaire, has been doing a lot of cool sketches lately. I suggested he should sketch his mental image of various IF people, which was something he had thought about! I put my hand up and got treated to:

Reasonably accurate, sans actual reference material! I typically present myself on the Internet as an old piece of character art I had commissioned for a game I never finished, and it undoubtedly gives people the wrong idea. I forget how much mathbrush knows of the real me, but it was close but also different.

If you don’t really know me, but want a comparison, I happen to be fundraising again for mental health this month. Ha ha! The ol’ fundraising/voyeurism switcheroo!

Non-Human Creativity

I continue to be concerned about AI’s environmental impact — water and air, but also the environment of writers and artists. But I still use it and explore it. There’s some fantastic opportunities despite the mounting issues.

This month I got access to the advanced voice chat with ChatGPT where rather than it being request-response, you can interrupt in the middle of an explanation and chats feel very slightly more natural. Although you can have an awkward latency dance, which reminded me of this bit from The 12th Man.

Last year I had a daydream of commissioning some people who ran an interactive fiction podcast to review my game for me. I’m lucky that I didn’t as I think the game wouldn’t have been for them and that’d make everything real awkward. This month I experimented with Google’s new NotebookLM which can, amongst other things, voice a podcast about a topic of your choosing from source material you provide.

I gave it last month’s newsletter and the results are incredible.

I’m quite familiar with the style of “creative” writing that LLMs tend to provide — very corporate and formulaic. This podcast was something quite different, although I expect to understand the format the more I play with it. It comes out as a naturalistic scripted podcast with the chat bouncing between the two hosts. There was some interesting summarisation, reinterpretation and elaboration on my words. Which is mostly fascinating given my… as some might say, ecletic or random-ass threads of narrative.

Of course it got some details wrong: I wasn’t entering in IF Comp, but reviewing it. It said my last name more times than I have ever heard in my life. The AI used “we” in terms of people grappling with the effects of AI . And it had this fantastic line:

“Sometimes life throws a tsunami at you. Sometimes literally, sometimes not.”

Really AI? Really?

I think the golden path through this AI revolution will be things like this, not made for grifting or displacing artists, but for personalized learning. Helping things go in your brain rather than bypass them. If you’re interested in these ideas Andy Matuschak has some good talks.

Having a Go At It

One little piece of advice that has helped me this month was the observation that this is the first time everyone has had on this earth. Everyone is still working it out.

It’s the realisation you have as a parent that you always remember your parents being masters of the universe and having it all together, but in reality they were just doing it by the seat of their pants. We’re all having a go at life. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes it’s really hard.

I think in creativity it’s good to remember this. This is the first time someone’s made some art or even just this type of art. The best thing we can do is acknowledge that and help them on the way to the next first time. To negate and destroy that first attempt doesn’t get anyone anywhere. If we feel down because we can’t make a 3d cyberpunk city in the first try, it’s okay, it’s our first go. If our review of that piece missed some angle, it’s okay, it’s our first go.

In a way, it’s always our first go at everything. But we should strive to have a good go at it and help others do the same. And we should seek new ideas and experiences, especially if they are weird and unfamiliar.

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But seriously, Spring, get it together.