by ·Comments Off on Gaming Frustrations Part 1: Prince of Persia

I’ve held back from going off on one about computer games for quite some time now, because quite frankly there are a million and two other sites and blogs out there that will always do it better.  However, it’s probably unavoidable as I have been maintaining a lifelong love affair with games and still do to this day along with many other refusing-to-grow-up individuals such as myself who continues to baffle parents as to why we haven’t grown out of this yet.

I have a strange condition whereby over the last couple of years, I have become increasingly susceptible to marketing, advertising and the hype machine of modern society that wants you to spend money on the Next Big Thing.  I blame this on working a boring nine-to-five week and then being sucker punched by gimmicky adverts that promise a little glimmer of excitement, but that’s beside the point.  The point is, that as a result of this condition (lets call it buying-new-things-syndrome:  BNTS) I have made a few purchases that have then somewhat languished as I either haven’t had time to use them or they just haven’t held my attention for the same amount of time that I expected them to.  This is in particular relevant to various games that I may or may not have bought over the past couple of years and then left to sit on the shelf in a state of semi-completion.

Yesterday evening and this evening, to relieve a little bit of angst-ridden stress, I decided that I’d cross what I could off my “to finish” list.  Behind the cut, I shall be talking about the rebooted Prince of Persia, so if by any chance you don’t want to know the score, look away now.  There may be spoilers, although at this point, considering that the game has been out for over a year, if you even know what I’m talking about, chances are these spoilers are akin to finding out that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father*.

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by ·Comments Off on Being Professional About Writing

Ah, David Hing, I see you are writing another article about something with which you have had no experience with and are no good at. Well done. In an age of Web 2.0, general comments and having your say, you reckon stuff with the best of them.

I love writing. I love the process of writing things down. When I was growing up, I would oscillate between playing computer games for hours on end, to writing fiction for hours on end. I just loved the way that it felt like watching television or films, but with me deciding what to do. It should be noted that this was the start of my particular brand of attention-span deficiency in that I started a lot of things and finished precisely none of them. It was also the first indication that maybe a plan wasn’t such a harmful thing after all. I’m actually very thankful that I wasn’t born ten years later, because had I been, I would imagine that most of this would have leaked its way on to the internet and become public domain, lurking around in the background ready to pounce out and scuttle any sort of professional career in anything that I might want to launch…but maybe that’s just paranoia. I’m…also now wondering if carrying on this blog post is a terribly good idea.

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by ·Comments Off on The Tortoise and ActionScript 3.0

HU-logoA while ago, I mentioned that I had written up a syllabus for my own course in programming which centred largely around C++ and then later on elements of ActionScript 2.0.  Needless to say this was a dismal failure and never quite got off the ground.

Whenever I’m studying something or have something quasi-professional that needs doing, pretty much anything else in the world becomes more interesting and appealing to me.  I understand this is not a phenomenon unique to me and it was an ongoing joke in a previous house that I lived in that you could tell when a lot of us had essay or project deadlines because the place was spotlessly clean.  This instinct to do something other than what my brain things it SHOULD be doing triggered around about the time I had something in my hands that looked vaguely like a course syllabus.

Of course, in this case, I had the last laugh over my bloody minded brain, as the poor thing jumped on to something different but that is in the same field and has instead for the last few days been trapped in a prison made of Flash and ActionScript 3.0, one of the programming languages that powers flash.

When I have something worthy of publication I will of course share, but for now I shall just have to state how much I’m enjoying finally getting some programming knowledge under my belt.  Up until now, it’s been like my dutch:  I understand more than I can speak, but I don’t understand much.  Now, my programming is at the level whereby I could probably reliably ask for directions to the railway station, even if I won’t necessarily understand the answer given to me.

by ·Comments Off on Inspiration and Projects

If you’ve noticed that I’ve been away from the blog for a few days, I have a couple of things to say to you:

  1. You must be my readership.  Tell me who you are so I can cater to you.
  2. There are two reasons why this has happened:
  1. A repeated failure of my Writer’s Quest
  2. Working on a few sporadic projects.

I think in life I draw inspiration from what other people around me are doing.  If you are ever down in the dumps about a project of some description, find some people that are doing the same sort of thing and find out what they’re working on.  I know that whenever I’ve been to the UK Web and Mini Comix thing that’s held each year, I come back geared up to work on comics after seeing all the weird and wonderful (and sometimes poor, but still inspiring) things that people have created in their spare time.

I recently represented myself as somebody who likes making things.  I don’t think this is strictly accurate.  I’m somebody who likes the feeling of having made something.  The actual process I find frustrating, but I’m willing to go through it if I see someone else doing something that I think I’d enjoy doing too.  Some might say this displays a lack of imagination, but I prefer to think of it as a short attention span.

Snakral

Snakral the Goblin

The project that I have finally got around to starting is something that’s been stuck in my head for several months.  Allow me to introduce you to Snakral.

Snakral is the protagonist of a comic that I’m working on called “Paladin”, about a young adult goblin who wants to rebel against the tradition of his species and train to be a knight protector of the realm, despite being rather weedy even by goblin standards.

Once I’ve finished a substantial amount, I’ll make it available in some way.

A friend of mine offered me some advice with this, namely to “not make it like Warcraft”, which was never the intention, despite my desire to start a comic about goblins and paladins whilst in the throes of online-game-addiction, but I am taking a page from the book of Warcraft developers Blizzard by saying this will be done when it’s done.  In other words, don’t hold your breath for new comics (which I hope nobody has done for my comics in the past anyway: I just wouldn’t want that on my conscience) as I have no idea how long this will take me to fully flesh out.  I’ve decided to take a much more ordered approach to this comic than my previous efforts with the Student Squad, which is very much a “ready, fire, aim” approach, without so much of the aim part, or if I’m being honest, the ready part.

Additional Notes:

Is it a bad sign that I really struggled to spell conscience?

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There’s a saying that everyone has a novel inside them. I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be a novel, but the sentiment is probably true and that even the most unlikely people have a lot of creativity inside them that they can’t get out. Everyone has something. A lot of people secretly work on little personal projects or just daydream about working on little projects but everyone has these little ideas that they want to get out.

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