Being faithful to the vision

This idea has been in my head for some time now, about this couple who made this famous wooden chair, and how they said that the hardest part of creating something great was simply being faithful to the original design, and having to say no to all of the other ideas and concepts that come up through the creative process...

This idea of being faithful to the original vision or design is something I have been struggling with in my game making project. I keep coming up against all of these great ideas that come about as a part of the creative process... but simply sticking to the base, simple, original idea is really the best way to ensure you have something great.

This weekend, I went over the first design document I wrote, and pulled out of it the original two key pillars I had for the game, and have been making sure that everything I have been adding to the idea is based very strongly in one or both of those two key tenants of the design.

Those two are 'Create' and 'Explore'.

I need to ensure that the foundation is set before I start building upon it, and that has been my project for the past few days (that and creating more art assets).

I admit that I have been putting off developing some of the much needed features of the game editor... but I feel the areas I am investing my time are also very important, and will start the week with finishing off the world object editors 'save' and 'load' object feature.

With much of the new art that I have made, the game is starting to feel like it has it's own unique look, and that has been encouraging me through the more difficult parts of development (the parts that don't actually produce any playable results). It's been this kind of progress that has taken up a significant part of my week. Building helper classes (a timer class that lets me set and listen for alarms, several enumeration lists that help me build menus, and a draw helper that makes it easy to build contextual help and instruction).

Now that the week is over, a new week begins, and planning out what I want to get accomplished is the first step in ensuring that there is productivity... if it weren't for these lists, I wouldn't believe I have gotten anything done (and that can just kill motivation).

Thats all for this week's post.

fidget widget out.