Well the great and mighty Xmas break is upon us. I will be staying home with my cats, instead of seeing my family for a variety of personal and work related reasons. However, I will be attending my Grandmother's funeral on the 22nd. I actually finished my Defend the Earth trailer, got some feedback via my pre-screening on Facebook and am now tweaking it. When it's done, I'll be posting it here. I'll need about 2 hours of consecutive work time to fix it up.
As for finishing the game itself, I'm going to need about two days of solid coding time in order to review my current code (regain a full understanding of what I've done) and then finish it up. Unfortunately I'm only getting about 1-2 hours of inconsecutive free time a day, until break happens. I even worked part of this weekend and was stuck doing chores, errands, catching up on sleep and such for most of it.
So what have I been doing with my time this week? Well I've been doing a perspective re-write of my novel. Yes, I wrote a novel, a little over a year ago, I shared it with about two dozen people, of which about six gave me feedback, including a blow by blow list of issues provided by an actual editor. My main crime is being a head hopper. I just can't seem to master the omniscient 3rd person narrative in novel form, while it's super easy to do in film scripts. So I'm attempting to re-write it into a limited 3rd person perspective, but I still want to have the narrative opening and closing via 30's serials... No idea how that's going to work. In the end I might have to kill (cut) that baby, which is sad, since it's that kind of intro / outro that I use to love about classic sci fi serials. I'm a huge fan of 60's - 70's sci fi novels, and it's unfortunate that their style of world setting openers is apparently "boring" to modern readers. In addition I will be extending the novel, taking in some recent changes in society, some of the humor wouldn't fly quite as smoothly in the current market and I can add jokes that are a bit more bite-ing, in a different way, by today's standards. This book was based on a script I co-wrote with Danielle about 7 or 8 years ago, and just look at how uptight things have gotten in that period of time. Hell Dungeons highly offended some people and compared to Adult Swim or South Park it was pretty tame.
I want to get this book finished up and on Amazon, so I can move onto three other stories which I think they would be a bit more interesting and unique. Already have the outlines and slug scenes written. Unlike my current work, "Captain Hairdo Conquers the Cosmos", they are not really based on anything directly, or spoofing anything, but rather my own "world" and hypothesis of what things may come. They are completely original stories, any one of which I could see randomly appealing to some of the younger adult audiences. I'm good at getting a first draft out, I basically need about 20 cups of coffee and a weekend alone. Polishing that manuscript, as you can see, takes me YEARS. lol. Oh and no my blog is nothing like how I write books, this is glorified email / journal writing to me. I don't proof read this (much) and just write how I think. Oh and I have two different versions of cover art for the book that were made about eight months ago. I'm leaning towards the semi-realistic one of the right, but the cartoon one looks much more crisp. What do you all think?
Oh and yes I did do SOME work on the game this week, I updated the level select system, check out my amateur artwork ;)
