The Creative Process #6 - Ends and Continuations

It’s the final few hours of 2022. The house has gone to bed and I’m awake, isolated in my office, coughing with an unexpected bout of COVID-19. No-one expects COVID — it never crosses a doorway into open arms, but man, it beat me up four months ago... Can’t it let me finish 2022 in peace?

Alas, not.

The end of 2022 feels like the ending to some projects. There’s the flurry of activity that almost took me by surprise. A raw panic that something was left out or forgotten. Then a quiet relaxation as I popped out the other side of Christmas and coasted towards New Years’ Eve… then BAM! sucker-punched with COVID and dragging myself along the last few steps.

2023 will be the quiet year. Nothing big. Just quiet work.

This time for sure.

Creating in a malestrom

December is assuredly a busy time for most. Amidst all the work Christmas parties, present buying and general organization, I tried to get back into creative work after a tiring November.

In previous years I had been productive enough to make a pixel art advent calendar for my family. No such luck this year. I didn’t even get any Christmas lights up around my house. My goals were much more modest — just move the needle on any creative project.

I’m dead set on finishing my interactive fiction game Hand Me Down. In some ways it’s close, in others, it’s far away. I just need to keep adding more until it’s sated. Not full, just sated.

Brian Rushton (@mathbrush), IF extraordinaire and all-round cool guy, had been posting his excitement about his next IF game and how the puzzles were going. I dipped my hand out and collected some of that raw enthusiasm and it gave me enough energy to smash out much of an area (with descriptions!) in Hand Me Down. I also came up with an NPC that I think is hilarious, but importantly, does not require too much coding.

Hand Me Down is a weird little thing. It’s supposed to be the games a father writes for his daughter. Each game is intended to be a failure — the first part is a game both widely under- and over-shooting his intended audience: his daughter at various ages. The second part attempts to make something new to match her age, but really never escaping himself.

Getting the aesthetic right is tough. There’s a sad note through it all, but I don’t want it to be depressing. The first part is intentionally fantastical, but I don’t want that to be off-putting. The dad is no doofus, but I feel like I need to write him as my lesser. But then I want to pack in jokes and beautiful words, because I myself am writing this.

And that’s all just within my own head. I refuse to think about what other people might think of it, because, man, how would I ever know until it’s written and out there. And then that’s too late! I want to finish it, and then release it and then fix it until it is worthy, contrary to all ideas of publishing causality.

And then my borrowed enthusiasm from Brian Rushton faded, and it was just me staring at Emacs again.

A little diversion

My work often ends the year trying to solve a set of really hard puzzles. I always try to chip in and maybe even solve a few, but I’m no master puzzler.

Being tired from November but excited about puzzles spun me off onto a tangent. I began to think all puzzles, all the time. I did more crosswords and word puzzles on my phone. I continued my reading through The Puzzler, by A.J. Jacobs.

I very gently put Hand Me Down on the table, still in view, and quietly assembled some notes for a project I’ve thought about for decades: Puzzle University, an interactive fiction puzzle game.

For the context and mental energy I had, this was the right decision. I was brainstorming, researching and writing down notes. Nothing too strenuous.

I even got ChatGPT involved. Early in the month I tried using ChatGPT to punch up some descriptions in Hand Me Down, and it did okay. The final result was a combination of my writing and its attempt. These conversational AIs aren’t very good when you want to guide them aesthetically. Ironically it’s hard to have an artistic conversation with them. Well, it’s easy, but fruitless.

But in a brainstorming, anything-goes paradigm, ChatGPT is fine. When thinking about buildings on a university, I asked it to give me twenty. Sure, some are duplicates, but occasionally it can fill in a hole my brain couldn’t. I even walked through the idea of the game and asked for its advice. Sure, some of its advice was dumb (make sure you put good animation and sound effects!), but it had devoured some ideas about interactive fiction design and gave me something to work with.

ChatGPT is the wall you practice tennis against. It’s often dull and repetitive, but occasionally can ding the conversation off in interesting directions. Ideally there’d be a person to bounce this all off, but you don’t need to respect an AI’s time. And you can tell it that its ideas are dumb.

I also played around with getting Midjourney to draw some of the characters and scenes. With both AI generators, you need to be real careful as it will draw or describe something too horny at the drop of a hat. And if you correct them, the NSFW filter will exasperatingly drop in to waggle its finger at you.

The Creative Process

This post marks six months of writing this newsletter. Early on I made a pact with myself on what I needed to do with the newsletter and what would be considered a success. I said I’d give myself six months to evaluate it.

The writing guidelines I have for myself say to “keep it realistic, positive and encouraging. Give people interesting stories and insights.” Given some of the feedback, I’ve matched that.

I also made sure I knew where the newsletter stood in my priorities:

1. Family and work
2. Creative projects
3. The Creative Process

But I also wanted it to be timely, and while not exactly on a clockwork deadline, I wanted it to be out by the end of each month. I achieved that.

My metrics for “definite success”, however, not so much. I personally know all but one of my subscribers. I’ve tried (admittedly weak) advertising of my newsletter, but didn’t get much traction. Friends of mine have explicitly shared the posts, but I didn’t see much of a blip on the stats.

I’ve also struggled with whether the content is the right target. It’s probably not content for “a general audience”, but it’s not so personal and rabbit-holed that it couldn’t be interesting to a stranger. I think!

I don’t have enough projects content to write it like a slow-burn advertisement. And I don’t have the time to make it into a series of tutorials.

Nevertheless, I think it’s going fine and I’m making sure it’s not a burden. I’ll probably stay the course, finding a creative thread to pull on every month.

I definitely welcome all feedback.

Art of 2022

While I still have energy, I’ll finish off this last post for 2022 with a compilation of the 3D art, finished and unfinished, that I did this year. Since my late teens, I’ve been fascinated by 3D art but never had any formal art training. This year I’ve really tried to improve my skills and complete things. I have a few pieces of art that I like. I even made an okay Christmas card amongst the craziness in December.

“Glow Mum” was an attempt to quickly replicate a friendly artist’s painting with a 3D version. I had to figure out how to do posing and hair, which was tricky.

“Rooftoppers” was unfinished. It was a city scene, hopefully empowered by Blender’s geometry nodes. I ran into issues and it ruined my gusto for it.

“Juventas”, “Shkadov” and “Zekto infection” were attempts to create alternative cover art for my mate Michael Purcell’s game Endeavour. While pieces of them worked out great, overall I ran out of juice when I hit November.

“Happy 40th” was my contribution to an awesome present. My friend Alex, a beautiful bearded man with a penchant for Dune, was turning 40 and his wife organized for friends to contribute stories or art. I made this piece of art that captured him, and didn’t look half bad. They used it for the cover of the book! A good present for a good guy.

“Street Food” I worked on for three months. It is my most detailed work ever. It came out pretty well, although there’s so much I’d want to fix.

“Christmas Card” was a spontaneous creation. My wife gives her colleagues baked goodies for Christmas, and I had Christmas cards on my mind. But just before Christmas, I smashed this piece together. Some elements (tinsel, surf-board, present) show off newer skills I’ve acquired. The surf was very tough geometry nodes, and doesn’t look right, but I had to roll with it. Roll with the surf… ahem.

Wrap-up

If you asked me in early 2022 if I could commit to making a dozen or so pieces of art, written a few thousand lines of a game, ten thousand words of newsletter posts WHILST also having a baby and getting COVID twice, I’d say thanks but no thanks. Such a task is impossible.

But I did it.

And while 2022 ends in 30 minutes, my creative journey continues. It’s good, I must say, to look back over the landscape. While it wasn’t all roses — and some of it was outright thorns — it’s good.

So on we go.