Wallitner Weekly 16
Hello everyone!
A lot of productive things happened this past week.
Shockingly, I did actually make progress on recording the videos for my theory curriculum. I say shocking because this passed week was rather busy AND I picked up a new skill that has been consuming a lot of my time.
A friend of mine sent me a poem about hope yesterday that got me thinking about ways to spin the story. The poem is called “Hope is not a bird, Emily, its a sewer rat” By Caitlin Seida. The poem talks about how hope is not this cute and delicate thing. Hope has seen some nasty things. Hope has been in the gruesomest of places and still survives. Which I think is dark, yet beautiful.
I have a lot planned for next week too!
Starting tomorrow, my fiancee and I will be staying with her mom for about a week. We’ve got some weddings and birthday parties to attend. I hope to be able to sneak away from the festivities to write. I don’t mind being social, but I prefer to go about my day in my pajamas rather than my Sunday best.
The Burden of a Good Idea pt 2.
I have made a terrible mistake. I was hanging out with some old friends last week and we were chatting about what we do for work nowadays. One of these friends is a computer science buff who codes software for some company. One of these friends is a graphic designer and makes ads for some marketing team. And then I write music.
Another friend of mine was listening to this conversation and said “You guys play video games, and between the three of you you have all of the makings of a game studio!” and I being the fool that I am took that seriously. So I grabbed a napkin (every great idea starts on a napkin) and we started writing ideas for a video game.
One filled napkin later, the idea would now be in the hands of our computer science coder friend. Until it would be ready to receive art and music. But of course that’s a heavy burden to carry and not at all an even distribution of the work. So I asked him what tools are needed to code a video game. He told me about a program called Unity… which is free. And he sent me away with a few books on how to code using the coding language C#.
Long story short I am now coding my own video game. And loving every minute of it.
At the moment our hero knows how to walk and how to jump. And he climbs a tower that is very tall. When the game is finished there will be 1000 floors in this tower and you’ll collect coins and fight monsters as you climb. My brother who draws has agreed to help me out by drawing pretty much everything you will see in the game. And thus “WallitGaming” has been born.
I made a promise to myself that I would still maintain my other hobbies and projects, however I am being thoroughly tempted by this game now. Especially because I can play it as I build it.
I could go on and on about ideas I’ve already mentioned “Its good to suck at something” (I’m about four days into this coding journey… I suck at coding haha) I’ve also said “If you have an idea, you might as well pursue it” Thats all fine and good, but there is also an element of do what you like to do.
I like to write music. I like to play video games. If I build a video game then I get to write the music for it AND I get to play a cool game too… its a win win! Not to mention its another feather in my hat. An admitedly very different feather from the others. But it’s fun to do. So it doesn’t feel like “Im learning how to code using C#” it feels like “Man this is fun and I get to talk about it with my brother”. He and I are building a world together literally piece by piece. (Thank goodness for copy and paste)
Did you know that if you want a character to jump, you have to first tell it what the ground is? It’s crazy stuff, but through the power of YouTube, anything is possible.
Long story long, I’ve made a terrible mistake and signed myself up for yet another MASSIVE project that I have no idea how to do. And I’m loving every minute of it. So if you have some crazy idea. Go be crazy. The worst thing that could happen is you end up knowing something you didn’t know yesterday.
