The joys of typescript, and over-scoping
Read the ‘premortem’ here, if you don’t know what Global Game Jam is.
Play ‘Soul Hunt’ instantly in your browser, even on mobile!
It’s over! 😌
(Is it?)
In a way, I failed. Once again, the design doc — while not bloated — ended up too dense. I didn’t manage to shirk my diagnosis from the premortem:
I tend to over-plan and under-develop, as can be seen in any of the past entries I’ve contributed to; many are broken or don’t have an end-state.
Soul Hunt is unfinished. But! Of all my GGJ entries, it is arguably the most polished, and even bug-free…
My arguably most ambitious jam yet — have I bitten off too much?
The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is an at times weirdly corporate-feeling but nonetheless fantastically community-driven annual mega event where folks literally all over the world come together in teams of up to five people to build some kind of video game or interactive experience in the course of a weekend.
It’s a lot like a hackathon; except that game jams were around (as far as I can tell) at least five years before hackathons were!
So far as game jams go, GGJ is the biggest of the big. This will be my fifth year(!) participating. It’s the one yearly (non-holiday)…
It’s hard when you can’t remember what it feels like
Up to the age of about 15 I was absolutely brimming with creative drive, such that the discipline to actuate and even finish projects came to me easily. I arguably produced more completed work between 2011 and 2013 than in the entire seven years since. (At that point I was sinking quite a bit of time into music, animation, and game development.)
It’s not completely clear to me why I lost my productive edge. Part of it was externally-driven mental and emotional burnout, which heavily impacted my ability to think creatively. …
2021 is the year I change that.
Hello! If you’re already following me, it’s probably thanks to one of a number of ad hoc and slightly contentious responses I’ve written over the years to various sociopolitical opinion pieces I’ve found floating around here on this platform.
All of those responses were born out by the spontaneous movement of the spirit, and were not at all consistent, deliberate, or researched.
With that somewhat jagged compositional past in mind then, in 2021 I am making it a goal to shift from being a passive, reactionary consumer of prose to a person actually…
I am obsessed with stories. With narrative. Wherever there is a pattern, an arc, a purpose. But especially where there are connections.
Stories are constructs, associations of disparate things, peoples, times. Threads that run through realities and experiences and connect them.
I love reading stories. I love hearing stories. I love finding and eking out the stories of others, their places, their cultures.
My mother was an anthropologist. That might explain it. She was always seeing connections. She read to me extensively when I was a child; and I listened. To her, to the radio, to sermons. …
Alex Rupp-Coppi
At a crossroads.
