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The Journey So Far, and The Future - Taming Dreams??

6 years ago4,648 words

After doing a whole lot of reflecting about the creative journey that I've been on over the years (which I briefly summarise here), I'm planning to return to Taming Dreams, but as a regularly-updating story told through 3D conversations rather than as a game.

I've been going through a lot of personal development these past few days, though I'm not sure whether the direction my mind is developing in is ideal! I'm still working through a lot of thoughts and things. I was going to write about all that here, but the other stuff I want to talk about will take long enough, so I won't for now.

What I do want to talk about is what I need to do with my future... if I even have one. I had a 'pre-op' assessment thing at the brain hospital a couple of days ago to see whether I was fit for surgery. I am; my health stats were all in the standard range, remarkably ideal even, which surprised me considering my less-than-ideal lifestyle. It made the whole brain surgery thing feel more real... It's on the 18th, and while I'll likely make a mostly-full recovery eventually, there's a non-zero chance I could die from a stroke or be left with permanent issues like vision problems or seizures or worse. I'll probably also need radiotherapy and checkups for many years afterwards, perhaps for the rest of my life. So that's a wonderful thing to have lurking just over the horizon.

I've been told that it'll take me about a year to recover from it, during which time I won't exactly be able to go out and live a 'normal' life (not that I ever have done, but still). It's 'fortunate' that I've spent so many years dabbling in creative things, hoping that one day they might take off, as I can continue to work on such things over the coming months rather than just sitting around doing nothing.

I've had serious issues with focusing on one project though, which have been going on for way longer than I'd like. I'm aware that I've written many times before in an "a-ha! This is the one!" kind of way about some new idea, which I dive into only to abandon it shortly after... It's embarrassing, and I wish I'd been able to stick with more things to completion.

The project that I most recently jumped head first into - ∞ the thing about gender roles with creatures called sindrels ∞ - was born of a fit of hypomania, rather than forming deliberately after sensible planning. When that erratic mental state faded, my motivation to work on that project went with it. Perhaps I'll return to it again sometime, but I don't think it's the best thing to devote my attention to at the moment.

Writing that long post about my history (which I'm still working on; I'll post the next bit soon) has been an inspiring but sobering experience, as being thorough means talking about all these abandoned projects, and there are a lot of them. Each was abandoned for a reason, though; usually life events getting in the way. I'll talk about each of those reasons in the longer entries I'll eventually write and post, but I want to share the gist of my overall journey more succinctly before I can move forward, so I'll do that in bullet point form here.

Rising

✽ I started making creative projects of my own when I was around 15, which were mostly inspired by the games that I devoted a lot of my time to playing, especially the old Final Fantasies that I'd discovered through emulators. This game development was just an after-school hobby, and I was driven by passion and the novelty of it all.

✽ I started and abandoned a few game projects, most of which were iterations of what would eventually become MARDEK's engine. That is, each failed project was a step towards something I did eventually complete. One of these iterations - the one just before MARDEK - was Deliverance (pictured).

Surfacing

✽ MARDEK was released, and was well-received. I made the second immediately after the first, and took ages with the third, but did eventually finish it.

✽ My website, Fig Hunter, was growing as a community. I had to manage a large group of people, which I didn't do well. I learned a lot, and hurt a lot.

Sinking Into Darkness

✽ MARDEK 3 drained me so much that I felt like I needed a break, so I tried focusing on similar but different projects for a while (though I'd jumped between projects during MARDEK 3's development anyway; suppressing intriguing ideas and the thrill of novelty is not at all my strong suit).

✽ As I got deeper into my twenties, moved country and lost all my in-person connections, and my long-distance romantic relationship fell apart, all while trying to appease a difficult community online, my existing mental health issues became overwhelming and it was difficult to focus on anything else. I considered suicide for the first time, and started seeing therapists for the first time too.

✽ I tried to escape my loneliness by joining local 'groups and clubs', but found only older, married people in them, who I couldn't really relate to.

✽ I'd also been putting more effort into honing my creative abilities. Before this, I'd never trained these skills properly and just relied on intuition, so devoting many, many, many hours to learning and practising things like anatomy etc did make a big difference to the quality of my work, I think.

✽ I'd always been irritated by the prevalence of violence in media, and it was around this time where I first started experimenting with 'non-violent combat' systems based around things like emotions. This also tied into the greater focus that coping with my mental health issues had in my life.

✽ I also designed the first incarnation of the Alora Fane world here, for a game called "Regression" which I never got very far with. I continued with the Alora Fane concept and designed other projects in that world, such as Alora Fane: Creation (pictured).

✽ To enhance my abilities further, and to hopefully find like-minded people as well, I went to do a Video Game Art course at some small, obscure art university place. I was 25 at the time. I did exceptionally well in terms of work and exceptionally poorly socially. I dropped out after the first year due to loneliness and was back to where I was before.

Finding The Light

✽ I tried to continue on with creative projects, but loneliness and mental health issues consumed most of my thoughts, so I wanted to base my work around those in some way... To help others with similar issues, but mostly to help myself.

✽ When I was at my worst, wanting so badly to die and be free of it all, I discovered some spiritual guru person via an audiobook and had a spiritual awakening that felt like "taking off a pair of dark glasses and seeing the world as it truly was for the first time", as I described it at the time. It was profound, uplifting, and I felt like I'd finally got life figured out. I wanted to share this with the world.

✽ I also had a renewed interest in MARDEK for reasons that I can't recall, but had been experimenting with the 'non-violent combat' RPGs for a few years so it felt wrong to return to something I felt I'd grown beyond. Flash as a platform was also becoming increasingly obsolete, and I didn't want to spend years making something I might not even be able to release at the end because of the format it was made in.

✽ A reboot, Taming Dreams, was born, and my passion for it was sustained for long enough to write literally hundreds of thousands of words of story and lore notes, and to produce three episodes and release them as an Android app. I still used Flash because I knew how, and it allowed me to publish for smartphones.

✽ I felt like I'd found my path, and was determined to stick with it... but the thought that I needed to find a partner to be happy was a consistent source of pain, and I felt like I wouldn't be able to meet anyone in a 'natural' way going down this path alone.

The Untamed Mind

✽ So, I applied for a Psychology course at a local university in the hope of both overcoming my mental health issues and finding social connections. I spent three years doing that.

✽ There, I met a couple of female friends for the first time in my life, and had my very first experiences with emotional friendships at the ripe old age of 27 (my previous friends had all been male, and male-male friendships tend not to be 'emotional' in the way that these were). I devoted myself to the academic work, but moreso to these two friends, one in particular.

✽ Creative work fell in importance because the opportunity to appease long-neglected social needs was overpowering. I wanted to stick with Taming Dreams, but was distracted... Also, Flash finally "died", which made the idea of continuing to make Taming Dreams in Flash seem unwise. Having to release it as an app was also challenging - for example, I needed a Mac to release it for iPhones, but didn't have one, so I never got around to that - and it all felt quite overwhelming.

✽ I learned a lot about people and the world during this time at university, and I feel I grew up a lot, but negative beliefs about my social abilities and desirability were reinforced, and I came to understand the frustration that 'friendzoned' 'nice guys' feel.

✽ I also found out that I had a brain tumour, and had brain surgery once and was told I'd have to have it again in the near future.

✽ My desire to die was stronger than ever. I had a noose around my neck at least once. Every day felt like agony. I didn't hide this, but my cries for help only led to being rejected more for being an emotional drain; the female 'best friend' I'd made at university - in whom I was deeply emotionally invested - cut me out because of my increasingly off-putting behaviour, leaving me with a gaping hole in my heart and shameful mental scars that still ache every day. Therapy and suicide hotlines only made me feel worse because of how little they helped.

✽ Making games seemed impossible due to this and the academic workload, though my creative drives remained and were largely channeled into a project where some female characters talked about the kinds of things I wish I had a real friend to talk about such things with (feelings, relationships, sex, etc). A way of coping with the loneliness, mostly. It started off 2D, but I made a 3D version of it.

✽ That project felt too personal to show to anyone, despite its value to me, so I tried experimenting with similar projects where characters 'just talked'. I made one I felt happy with - Divine Dreams (pictured) - but it was a 2D browser-based thing, and I felt restricted by its limitations.

✽ University and thoughts of imminent death continued to interfere with most of my other creative work, and I didn't achieve very much.

✽ I graduated with a First-Class Degree and a couple of acquaintances I'll probably never see again (so not much better in terms of connections than before I went to university). Lots of painful new memories to dwell on, though!

Now

✽ After graduating, I moved back in my with parents, as it wouldn't be long until I had to finally have the brain surgery I'd been putting off for more than two years, and I'd been told it'd take a year to recover from, during which time living alone wouldn't exactly be wise. I'm currently waiting for that surgery still.

✽ I felt a bit lost at first, feeling like I should spend my time focusing on creative projects, but not really sure what. I came up with some ideas that I liked and had every intention of sticking with, but nothing really stuck because they were all about new characters, new worlds, new stories, which were born out of a desire to make something rather than out of actual passion for the subject matter.



And that's where I am now... But reflecting back on all that a few days ago, an idea occurred to me:

Why don't I just return to Taming Dreams, but as a story told through 3D conversations rather than as a game?

That's what I'll spend the rest of this post talking about.



As I mentioned, I made a lot of notes for Taming Dreams. Way more than I thought I had. I never really planned the original MARDEK much at all, but when I decided to reboot it, I was determined to learn from my mistakes and do it properly this time. One document - a "rough summary" of the story as a whole - is literally 100,000 words long; over 200 pages in Google Docs. That's ridiculous! There are books shorter than that. And I'd actually finished it, too; I didn't just lose interest or direction half way. I know exactly what happens at the end and everything that leads up to it. And I actually like a lot of the planned plot developments and characters too, such that I occasionally feel disappointed that I never got the chance to reveal them in the story. I think I've included remarks to that effect in recent blog posts, actually.

We live in an Age of Nostalgia, and I understand that people would want a MARDEK 4 that continues from the others because they're attached to them; they're linked to fond memories from their youth. Reboots of old ideas aren't at all uncommon, though.

In my ∞ post about nostalgia a while ago ∞, I mentioned something called Homestar Runner, which I used to be fond of when I was a teenager. The creators got 'proper' jobs and stopped producing content in their created universe for several years, but recently returned to it, though it seemed to me that there wasn't a huge amount of interest. YouTube videos and a Twitter account were definitely getting some attention, but they just seemed like a few stragglers holding onto old memories when most had long ago moved on; it seemed unlikely to me that they'd find new fans. It felt somewhat sad to me, seeing that; I felt mildly embarrassed being one of the ones dwelling in the past.

More recently, though, they did a Kickstarter for a board game... which earned over a million dollars within a short space of time. I doubt very much that most of the backers were excited about that specific board game. Rather, it's more likely that they'd enjoyed Homestar Runner a lot as children or teenagers, and wanted to share some of the wealth they'd since accummulated, to support the creators as thanks for the pleasant memories. The Order Of The Stick had similar success with a Kickstarter a few years ago, also earning over a million. And of course Homestuck made over a million when it ran a crowdfunding campaign too.

Seeing these successful Kickstarters has made me wonder how many people would be willing to support a MARDEK 4 financially... But even if there was the potential to make that kind of money (which there most certainly wouldn't be; I'd be lucky to get $10,000, I imagine, since MARDEK was nowhere near as popular as those other things), I don't have what it takes to rally a crowd for funding. To me, doing that kind of promotion - and creating a whole bunch of what are essentially ranked gifts to make investments feel worthwhile - seems infinitely harder than actually making a game. It'd take months to make enough of the game to show off in the first place, I'd have to devote myself to essentially running a social campaign for a whole month when I'm too scared to even look on Facebook for weird mental illness reasons, and I can't stave off the depression for long periods either... I just don't feel like I can do it.

I feel that things like Homestar Runner, Order of the Stick, and Homestuck were able to worm themselves so deeply into people's lives because they provided compelling content regularly, particularly in the form of characters to whom viewers could become familiar with and attached to.

Humans run on narrative. Our ancestors told tales of Hercules and Beowulf, these days it's Iron Man and Batman. While the mechanical actions of games are of course appealing, I think what really sticks in people's minds for a long time are the relationships that they develop with fictional characters. When people have asked me to continue with MARDEK, it's rare that anyone expressed a desire for more of the gameplay; they usually just want to know what happens next to the people they'd grown attached to in the time that they spent with them.

I know that there are tons of creators out there making webcomics, web series, things like that... and very few of them are successful or profitable. Like most things in the world, it's only a infinitesimal fraction that receives wide acclaim and appeal.

I feel like the 'people just talking' format that I've been experimenting could work. It'd be easy for me to update it regularly, so I'd be able to add a new conversation multiple times per week, perhaps even every day. One of the things that irritates me about webcomics is that you can wait several days for a new strip, which can often just include less than a sentence of dialogue; single scenes can stretch on for months, because it takes so long to draw each panel. Using 3D characters with recyclable emotes and animations means that I can make a character and area once, then reuse them for multiple scenes, and as the dialogue is written as text, each conversation could be quite long. Watching characters emote as they talk, and having them talk for quite a long time, would hopefully build attachment to the characters beyond what you might get from the average webcomic.

I read through my lengthy Taming Dreams notes over the past few days (which took ages, as you can imagine!), and it could definitely work in this format without changing very much.

The gameplay would have just been an irritating obstacle anyway, yet it would have taken the majority of the development time. I feel that as we get older, spending hours and hours on some game becomes less and less appealing or really possible. There's just no time, there are other things that need doing. So asking that from people seems a bit much. Asking for only a few minutes every day or every several days to read a fragment of an ongoing story seems less of an off-putting investment.

Making and publishing a game would require going through channels like Steam or the app stores, which would be a hassle and probably too difficult for me with my weird social phobias. It'd need to be fully finished before getting to that point, too, and keeping up the motivation while getting to that finish line - getting no real 'rewards' along the way - would be really tough.

With this conversation format, though, I can upload each scene once it's done, just to my own website, plus I'd have complete freedom to include whatever content I wanted (tons of nudity, of course!) rather than being bound by store rules. There'd be constant involvement from both me and the readers, and it'd really feel like an ongoing, organically evolving thing that'd hopefully grow over time, rather than being a one-shot thing that, if it goes badly, would mean many months were effectively wasted.

Patreon's becoming more established these days, so I feel that content like this has more of a chance of being profitable; in the past I would have had to rely on adverts, which I doubt would have worked out. I doubt that most Patreon users make anything like a living wage from it, though I wonder how much Homestar Runner, Order of the Stick, and Homestuck would have been generating each month if they'd used Patreon in their heydays!

I technically have a Patreon account, and I was really pleased when people were willing to support me through that back when I first opened it! I haven't talked about it or linked to it in a long time just because I'm embarrassed and don't want to ask for money when I'm not regularly producing anything... though I've always intended to get back to it once I do get the ball rolling on some project. I wouldn't expect to earn thousands of dollars a month from it or anything, especially not at first, but if I did get into a good update schedule and people became devoted to the story, then perhaps it's something that could allow me to work on a project like this in the long term.

Perhaps I could make donations feel worthwhile by allowing patrons to view new episodes a couple of days in advance? Donating just $1 a month to get that bonus doesn't feel like a huge amount to ask.

I'm very aware though that Taming Dreams isn't exactly the MARDEK that people have fond memories of... and as it's a bastardised version of that familiar thing, it'd definitely be met with a negative reaction by some. The mobile version of Taming Dreams definitely was. But I found from that that while there was uneasiness at first, eventually the majority of people did get on board with the idea and seemed enthusiastic about where I was going with it.

I also don't think it'd be wise to target a limited and dwindling demographic. Yes, some people fondly remember MARDEK, but as a group, that could only ever decrease in size. It'd be way easier to make new Taming Dreams fans than to appease old MARDEK fans. It's annoying if you are one of those long-time fans, I understand that, but I hope you can see where I'm coming from here.

This seems a sensible idea, anyway, and it's something that I hope to pursue from here! I'll be building on so much that I've already made, so mostly it's going to be a conglomeration of ideas that I've already put a lot of time and thought into rather than something entirely new built from scratch. The main issue with things like Divine Dreams and the Herbal Daemons thing was that I planned some characters and a general setting, but I didn't really know what to do with them after that and just hoped things would work themselves out somehow. It seems, from looking into my past, that the MARDEK story has been going through various iterations since I was like 14 or 15 (I've 'remade' it like four times already), so I've already got so much to work with, and the characters have deep emotional roots in my mind - grown over many years - that new ones never could have.

I feel that explanation was a bit disjointed, but I hope you can understand why I'm deciding to do this as I am!

I've sort of started work on it, though mostly I've just been playing around with some technical/visual things, such as the design of the characters. It's important to get this right from the beginning if I intend to reuse character models as I go along. I'll talk a little bit about that in the remainder of this post, for those who are interested in such things.



Basically, I want to settle on a style I like the look of, but which isn't so complex that it takes ages to add new characters. The production of proper triple-A quality character models typically involves several stages, like making a very detailed digital sculpture, 'retopologising' it (that is, creating a simplified mesh by doing what's essentially a '3D trace' over the sculpture, which is very time-consuming), deriving a normal/bump map from the sculpture to add apparent-but-not-actual detail, etc... I don't have the skills or patience for that. It isn't even a look that I particularly like, or which I feel would be fitting for this kind of project. I'm more drawn to the accessible charm of the low poly look, but I've yet to decide exactly how low poly to go.

The first human model I ever made was this, back in 2014:




That was ages ago, but I still rather like it because it has a distinct style about it. It uses an extremely low-resolution texture with visible pixels, which I quite like, especially since I feel that this super-low-poly look is the 3D equivalent of simple pixel art. I'm wondering whether to try something like that... though one of the most important features will be emotable faces, which would be challenging with this. I'd probably have to draw a bunch of separate faces and switch between textures, which might work okay, but I don't know.

Currently what I've made are these base models:




They're largely derived from the sindrel ones that I made a few days ago; I felt like I shouldn't let the time and effort I'd put into those go to waste (the shoulders are more well-defined in these ones though!). These aren't any specific characters; it's common practice to make base models like this to derive specific models from later, to save a lot of time.

I think the faces look acceptable, maybe?




They use a simple face rig which I designed with ∞ the models for a previous project ∞ and which seems to work well for the kinds of expressions that I want them to have.




Beautiful.

They're quite low poly, but I seem to be most comfortable working with models without a ton of vertices, and since the intention is to run this in browsers - both desktop and mobile - using lightweight models seems like a good idea from a technical standpoint. I doubt that modern browsers would struggle particularly much to handle much more complex models, but still.

I think they look a bit generic in terms of style, but maybe that's not such a bad thing. I suppose it wouldn't feel natural for me to do something extremely stylised, in a cartoony way, like you might see in a Pixar film or something; these are very much just a 3D version of the sorts of faces you can see in my early work. I envy artists with more appealingly distinct visual voices, but I suppose it's something that's intuitive to them, which can't really be faked if it's not something you naturally do.

I'm still playing around with ideas at the moment, anyway. I want to be sure that I can stick with what I decide on in the long term, rather than feeling dissatisfied later and having to redo a lot of the graphics.



So yes. I want to post a working prototype soon so then it's clearer what I want to do, but the one from ∞ this post ∞ should give a good idea. It's basically that, but with the Taming Dreams characters and story.

I'm looking forward to having something more substantial to show soon!