First monthly review of my work as a narrative-writer-indie-something go! As a part of my commitment to writing more frequently on the blog, I will publish a review of the month to assess how I am doing. These reviews will be mostly work-related, but I may decide to sprinkle some amount of personal here and there.

Let’s go.

Cutting Loose Projects

With the beginning of September I focused on getting my schedule cleared of stalling projects. I had been dabbling in Godot for a couple of weeks to learn how to implement two small projects I had in mind. However, they were going nowhere, and their time cost had surpassed the benefits.

These two games were not commercial projects. In fact, they were presents for friends and family. It is a common pattern for me to obsess on present projects and remain stuck in polishing them. This time, I cut them short, and was happy to see that the receivers were very happy nonetheless. It’s always the thought what matters the most. I was able to overcome my polish frenzy also because a new project came up.

Starting a New Project

A former colleague and friend of mine (hi Nicola!) asked me if I wanted help on the new commercial project I was going to start soon. I accepted wholeheartedly: Nicola is an amazing developer and I was looking forward to work again with him after I left Memorable Games.

So, we started to meet regularly online and laid the ground for the work. The working title of the project is DK, a narrative experience with a fantasy flavor. We are building on my original concept, now greatly expanded in scope thanks to Nicola’s skills as as game designer (much more systemic than I am) and programmer.

I am very excited about DK. Since the juiciest part of the development so far has happened in October, I will use the next monthly report to discuss it more thoroughly.

Learning to Program

On top of all these projects, I resumed dabbling with coding. I have been following Chris Pine’s much enjoyable book about Ruby for the past two months. I am quite diligent in practicing every day.

I chose Ruby mostly because of Pine’s book, which I remembered fondly from the time I started programming (stopping soon after) at around 16 years old. Also, I own the Dragon Ruby game toolkit from an itch.io bundle, and am very interested into delving deeper into this beloved, niche framework. I was inspired by this article by Raph Koster to find a programming language I felt comfortable in; Ruby hit that button. Now, I look forward to complete Pine’s book and actually start building things in Dragon Ruby.

Conclusion

Overall, I am very satisfied with how things turned out. I ended quickly the projects which did not need any more work, and shifted to the new, emerging ones. This September really felt like a new beginning. That’s the best thing you can ask September to be, I believe.

See you in October,

LF