{"id":3218,"date":"2016-08-19T21:26:52","date_gmt":"2016-08-19T20:26:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/?p=3218"},"modified":"2016-10-07T12:18:01","modified_gmt":"2016-10-07T11:18:01","slug":"development-diary-17-a-new-approach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/blog\/2016\/08\/19\/development-diary-17-a-new-approach\/","title":{"rendered":"Development Diary #17: A New Approach&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Another few months of radio silence here unfortunately, so far this year has been a weird mixture of stop-start freelance work and\u00a0confusing\u00a0business-y stuff.\u00a0Looking at my previous post from the end of last year, I was optimistically hoping to have all the major systems for the game\u00a0in place and, at this stage, be focused solely on artwork. Progress hasn&#8217;t been quite that straightforward sadly so\u00a0I&#8217;m sort of changing approach again&#8230;<!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I&#8217;ve decided to work on and release <em>Toryans\u00e9<\/em>\u00a0as a collection of smaller bits rather than in one big one,\u00a0not\u00a0in an episodic sense though, more like a short story\u00a0collection. So, while they&#8217;ll share an\u00a0art style, certain themes and some\u00a0characters and locations might reappear in several parts, they&#8217;ll all exist as distinct works in their own right, be\u00a0playable separately\u00a0and in any order.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">There are a few\u00a0reasons for the new approach&#8230;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Nearly all the images and clips I&#8217;ve shared so far have been from one main story\u00a0within the game, focusing on one character. In the last few months I reached\u00a0a point with that story that\u00a0felt like a nice, natural place for an ending. The problem was this left me with lots of unused ideas, characters and locations, some of which I&#8217;m extremely fond of, but which I hadn&#8217;t managed to fit in yet.\u00a0By abandoning the idea that all these elements have to exist within one single game, I can let that story end where it feels right but keep exploring the other ideas and characters and give them their\u00a0own space.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Another issue is motivation. In the time since I started working on <em>Toryans\u00e9<\/em>,<em>\u00a0<\/em>I&#8217;ve finished numerous projects for other people but nothing of my own. A couple\u00a0of these jobs had a similar scope to the smaller ideas I&#8217;m talking about here; they were technically challenging and, on occasions I struggled to get them done, but they all got delivered on time, on budget, to everybody&#8217;s satisfaction and in a matter of weeks\/months instead of years. When you can actually see the end of a project it&#8217;s much easier to struggle through the difficult bits. Trying to stay motivated on my own work and finish it all in one enormous pile is becoming more and more difficult.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">So, with all that in mind, a\u00a0few months ago, I took one of the smaller ideas, wrote up a treatment and a schedule and applied for a small amount of funding from a local arts body, an award with a stipulation that work is completed by an agreed deadline. The idea is to treat it like another freelance job and finally get something of my own finished.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">I&#8217;m currently in the midst of sorting out a few particulars but, all going well, I&#8217;ll make another post in a couple of weeks with some more details, a story outline, some concept art and, most importantly, a firm release date&#8230;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">In other news, I&#8217;ve been doing a fair amount of house-keepy stuff recently;\u00a0updating websites, organizing domains, hosting etc. I&#8217;ve redone the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.toryanse.co.uk\/\"><em>Toryans\u00e9<\/em><\/a> website and logo, ditching the Amatic font which seems to be absolutely everywhere now, in favor of the handwritten title you can see in the header. I&#8217;ve also been working on a\u00a0website and logo for my company, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arcto.co.uk\/\">Arcto Games Ltd<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-3225\" src=\"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-content\/media\/arctosite1.png\" alt=\"arctosite1\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-content\/media\/arctosite1.png 640w, https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-content\/media\/arctosite1-300x225.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Both of these new sites are built using\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/getskeleton.com\/\">Skeleton<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0mark my first real foray into CSS aside from cutting and pasting bits of WordPress themes. They&#8217;re both extremely simple but I&#8217;m hoping they load a bit quicker than the clunky old ones and they should play a bit nicer on tablets and mobile.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: justify;\">Lastly, I&#8217;m not sure how many people still sign up for mailing lists but I&#8217;ve got one of those now too!? If you fancy a little summary of what I&#8217;m up to appearing in your inbox every now and then you can sign up for <em>The Arcto Newsletter<\/em>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/tinyletter.com\/arctogames\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another few months of radio silence here unfortunately, so far this year has been a weird mixture of stop-start freelance work and\u00a0confusing\u00a0business-y stuff.\u00a0Looking at my previous post from the end of last year, I was optimistically hoping to have all the major systems for the game\u00a0in place and, at this stage, be focused solely on &#8230; <a title=\"Development Diary #17: A New Approach&#8230;\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/blog\/2016\/08\/19\/development-diary-17-a-new-approach\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Development Diary #17: A New Approach&#8230;\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3274,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55,3],"tags":[45,96,64,61,100,76],"class_list":["post-3218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-development","category-news","tag-2d","tag-design","tag-dev-diary","tag-rambling","tag-reel","tag-toryanse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3218"}],"version-history":[{"count":50,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3275,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions\/3275"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holyfingers.co.uk\/main\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}