Today is a landmark day! It's when all of my WoW characters were level 24 at the exact same time. But then I played one of them a bit more, and he's 25 now.
Why did this landmark happen today? Because of all the crazy ideas surrounding Adventures Of Bouapha 3. It's clear that this is going to be a Big Game. Not some quick thing of a couple months, but a serious project that spans hopefully less than a year, fingers crossed. I picture it being a great game and in the top of Hamumu fandom (below Supreme, as usual), but I dread the long road ahead. Maybe we can trim it down to a six-monther? I don't know what will happen. That's the magic of self-employment. Freedom and mayhem.
So back to the original question, why did that make the WoW landmark happen? Well, when a game is in the very first stages of development, it's all ideas floating around in the ether. Then, those ideas need to hit the metal and become actual content. That is the exact point I am at now. Figuring out what to do first, and what needs to be done before other things. That's a very complex job with no real answers, so I set it aside and play games. I just constantly think about it for a few days. I've already worked out a bunch of the details of how things will be, but I haven't quite hit the fulcrum point yet, the spot where it snaps into place and I know where to begin. It's not just gaming, though. I toss and turn in bed, have trouble falling asleep and wake up early. I zone out while I think I'm watching TV. I walk around the yard looking at nothing. All of it is a part of an intense process of deciding how to turn the ideas into reality - and of course how to compromise the ideas so they can fit into reality. I've also done a bunch of typing to get the ideas down so I have something concrete to work from. I've even been sketching out a map.
So
that is why I played many hours of WoW today. Not because I'm lazy! I was
thinking.
This is where my progress stands now: I have solved the problem of how to create a giant city. I'm just going to break it into Districts, which are each a level, connected to each other by roads. It's going to be a little more seamless than my usual games - I'm getting rid of the fade-in/fade-out, just having an instant cut. It'll still be a cut, not a smooth scroll, but that's the compromise. I certainly
could do a big thing with maps loading on the fly and scrolling together, but that's just a lot more trouble than I need. So now I'm stuck at the point of what to do. There's miles of content I could be creating, but that involves turning on my other computer, and that's no fun at all. Man, I hate Vista.
