A few transitions happening the end of last week to kick off the remaining two months of my stay in BKK. I finished my last classes at the Village Education Centre, and also polished off a website redesign for them. It’s not fully live but you can preview it here. It’s a CSS design template on top of a Joomla CMS install. It was nice to practice some clean, typical web design for a change.

I’ve also started my final classes teaching multimedia at the same old design college, which is comfortable enough since I know the material and the conditions well. The Village was a good experience, especially the opportunity to work with some developmentally challenged kids. But still it wasn’t quite my cup of tea, mainly because I prefer more mature students who can provide their own direction, and the material wasn’t my forte. I am after all a designer and I do my best teaching design. The kids were a joy to work with though. :-)

Other than that, my final thesis for my MA will be due near the end of August. Even though my schedule has cleared up, teaching-wise, I am currently under a great deal of personal stress about a few things, and I have not been able to do as much work towards my MA recently. Even if my thesis is still rough I have to hand something in. It’s too important to pass up.

As it stands I’m still very much looking forward to coming home and settling down some - get a decent job, etc. That hasn’t changed. I wish I could come home sooner, but it’s still makes more sense for me to finish my MA here. So, counting down the weeks, I am…

So, after weeks of what seem to be Life happily wreaking havoc upon my schedule, I am finally getting to a long hoped-for productive position with my practice, and lo and behold! I am just about to really get into drafting my final Masters Thesis, and not long after that my trip home.

To be fair I’ve been horribly stalled, and without much enthusiasm or motivation to drag myself out of the stalls, between the bouts of: sicknesses, food poisoning, a Visa run, and other things I care not to mention here - which have all beset me in recent weeks.

At first, I typically berated myself and considered my lack of productivity a byproduct of personality deficiencies, a familiar old cognitive behaviour pattern - I wasn’t maintaining motivation, I was choosing to procrastinate, I was never going to finish my project, I was not being productive enough, etc… Suddenly, though, I feel that in reality I have to slough off these misgivings and simply rise again into the saddle and continue with my work, however it moves forward! I may have been less productive than I would have liked in recent weeks (often for actual, valid reasons even), but I can choose to not let that get me down and perpetuate the cycle of inactivity and negative thoughts; I can choose to keep working and do my best to remain active and happily practising my craft.

I am reminded as well of the continual refrain I have in the back of my head, “Just do it!”, from an old co-worker who perhaps saw my muddling, overly pensive form of inactivity long ago and used the popular Nike ad campaign-cum-sage advice to motivate me.

In fact, I have found many times recently that, in truth, things seem worse when viewed with forlorn eyes before the start, and not nearly half so bad when seen at mid task. It is an annoyance, though, that it seems a harder trick to remember than to learn. One of many, truthfully. ;-)

Happily, my head feels clearer and my body feels more immune to the typical malignancies of life in BKK, which has given rise to better cognition and probably to this change in tactical attitude. Knowing that I have a flight home - a definite, one-way departure to my time in Thailand - also gives me more vigour.

I’ve finally booked my flight home! I will be leaving BKK on Sept 1st flying to Vancouver. I’m going to hang around in Van for a few days before flying back to Ontario and home to Cambridge. :-D Will be great to be home again. I am really looking forward to it. Sucks to be leaving behind numerous things here in Thailand that have been great, like friends and beaches… but it will be good to finally move on. It will be 3 years less a month that I’ve called Thailand home, more or less. Which has honestly been long enough. Lately the heat and pollution and various other factors have been causing me stress and health issues. I’m not naive enough to think that everything will be perfect wherever I end up next, but just being home for at least a while will be fantastic! :-D

I’m back from a three day trip to Laos and I’m Gold again until September with another Tourist Visa. Feels good to get the last one finalised and off my mind. I had a nice rest in Vientiane as well which happily cleared up a couple nagging health issues that had been plaguing me for a while. Another thing I will be glad to leave behind in BKK when I leave…

Unfortunately the preparation for my trip and the trip itself were an extended exemption from my games work and also my MA that is not so great. Once again, I really have to get back into the swing of things, which is getting increasingly more difficult. The count down has already begun ticking in my head and my schedule. Only three months left now - well, just a snidge under. I’m afraid to say that my motivation has been lacking lately, for various reasons. Really, I’m just going to have sit down and examine the ones I think are inhibiting my work and try and clear them away.

After being asked twice yesterday by two people I haven’t seen in a while, and after checking its veracity on a scale this morning, I have apparently lost some weight (10 pounds!) without even noticing it. :-O

I have to assume it’s because I have cut back almost completely on my Guinness drinking (for health reasons) and have also been eating a bit leaner (though far from starving myself) to keep my budget low.

Either way, it’s a surprise to me! Though I wonder why I still have slight love handles if I’ve supposedly lost the weight I gained over the last year? Who knows… hehe. ;-)

So, even as I identified stop-gaps in my production process that I wanted to work on for my MA quite a while ago now, I’ve found myself amidst one of them. Indeed it has turned into a bit of a blind-spot, even as I was laying out and planning the project. Basically, I am beginning to be concerned with the amount of work necessary to complete The Human Trap. With seven levels and the design and animation for each, not to mention audio… well, it’s quite a bit to be getting on with. At first, I believed that working with my code-collaborator would ease things along, sharing some of the workload and helping to maintain inspiration. But since my buddy is too busy to help lately, I am faced with doing it alone. As usual, as well, there are often unaccounted for tasks that appear during any production that expand the work schedule.

Regardless, after reflecting on how to best move forward knowing that it’s a mighty challenge, I have decided to create a series of benchmark goals - focusing on completing exemplary levels, one at a time, to best take advantage of the time and resources I have. Do what I know is needed and easy to do now, and focus on completing one level at a time.

One of the goals for this project is to add some kick-ass work to my out-dated portfolio in preparation for finding full-time, long-term work in the Fall. The biggest goal still remains to create the full online experience and have it well exposed, etc. That goal has not changed, but I realise that I need to focus on smaller baby-steps to help get me there - especially if I am navigating these shoals solo. This is also necessary to minimise possible panic and freak-outs because of a “potentially” unmanageable workload - something that often set me back as well, thinking about things too much instead of just going about doing them.

So, I’ve been working on background graphics for The Human Trap to get my level design mojo flowing. I finally just had a break-through on the first, introductory level setting and had to post it. It went through many reworkings and reductions, and though it is a bit removed from my intial idea it definitely has the feel I was looking for. Since his home is a stetch of ‘pasture’ in the Realm of Myth, I was going for otherworldy, surreal and strange in varying proportions - without going over the top and being crazy colour saturated. I like to think I’ve achieve it in a subtle yet pervasive way. :-)

The Flying Long Horse isn’t posed or anything, and there’s no proper shadow (which I am hopeful to include later) but he does sit well, almost canteringly gallevanting around the landscape. Anyway, here’s the image.

So I’m still knee-deep in Dink and Nipples game development. I don’t have anything new to post content-wise, but I am desperately trying to get into graphics-mode soon. So there will be some new things to lookie-lookie at in the foreseeable future.

I’ve finished an initial draft of the GDD (game design document) for The Human Trap. Mostly it was just transcribing the mess and plethora of details from my notebook into OpenOffice. It became an obvious pressing need after a meeting with Toon to recap what had been settled on so far and realising that I had to have one reference where it was easy to see what had been decided. So, overall a natural progression into the GDD, which is nice. — I enjoy writing up proposals and documents, so it was nice to tap that off. If I get to polishing it up soon I will post it online here. My main emphasis at the moment is design so the documentation is being done where necessary. While working independently there is less need to polish the docs up since I am the one funding and doing the work.

The biggest milestone on my list of things to do is level design. The overall gist and sway of the story has been detailed; the major characters have been illustrated; the game-play and interactivity have been outlined… and now it’s the level specifics that have to be set down. The player has to lead Dink and Nipples through four different stages to reach the final level. The levels in each stage are already outlined, but the actual level construction and obstacle-puzzles need detailing. The more puzzle-logic levels were the first ones fully detailed - being the easiest to do on paper. The more side-scrolling, full landscape levels are turning out to be irksome.

I had intended to sketch out all the elements for these levels on paper before moving into production and prototyping, but I’ve hit a wall. How do you get from the overall idea for a level to the final level design, one where every rock and leaf has been placed? In traditional tile-based side-scrollers, you use a level-designer. (Basically, a little application where you place the graphics on a canvas.) Since the level design for The Human Trap is not tile-based - it’s one large, non-repeating graphic element - I can’t go that route. I have decided to forego laying out entire levels on paper for now and instead will start making a mess and mashing things up graphically first. I need to get some inspiration going to fill in those spaces I am not sure how to fill at present. I also know I will inevitably come back and draw it all out on paper when I have progressed far enough to get an idea of what each level will look like. It will also give me an idea of what, where and how the obstacle puzzles will present. Incidentally, here’s a nice thread on the indiegamers about ‘game planning vs doing’.

In a related stream, I’ve also been trolling around online looking for online game, casual game and flash game development forums and resources in an attempt to find an active game community in which to post. I’m partially looking for comments and feedback on what I’ve got so far for The Human Trap, but also just to see if I can contribute anything as well. Since I have a smaller group of design friends here in BKK than home in Canada I’m also feeling the yearn to talk about design work in general. Thankfully I’ve found a few good resources that I am going to explore. Here are some of them, general as well as specific, if anyone wants to see what the online casual games world is like:

Kongregate
Jayisgames
Game|Life
Indiegamer.com Forums

I’m also considering and doing initial fact-gathering about potential marketing options for The Human Trap. The two main objectives for this production are to get a kick-ass project under my belt, and to see where I can take the game online and online in possible revenue-making avenues. I need to allow for certain possible options in the future, BUT! for now I have to get down to work. ;-)