juniorkaiju-blog - Tumblr blog

[juniorkaiju-blog]

Refining Short-Term Goals and Focus

It’s been quite a few weeks since I’ve been able to put together another post. When you have a full-time job, a family, and lots of regular responsibilities that comes with both, your time gets eaten up pretty quickly. This sounds like an excuse, but it seems to be one of many reasons why a lot of independent developers collaborate and form small teams - which is something I’d like to do one day, once I’ve honed my skills in digital art and programming. It’s become increasingly important to me to make the time for things I haven’t been previously. For so long, I’ve treated work like some sort of marathon that wipes me out by the time I leave the office to when I get home; being too tired to do anything else that requires even the smallest bit of effort. Because of all this, I’ve grown an understanding of my need to list things out and tackle them one at a time, making progress if nothing but in small chunks.

I thought I should take some time to define some short-term goals of mine.

1.) Finish a program that functions and has animated sprites.

2.) Draw a variety of pixel-art assets to use later on bigger projects.

3.) Stay focused on goals 1 & 2, and chip away at them whenever I have free time.

4.) Tinker with the tools I already own.

I’m going to start breaking this down with number 4, because it sets the tone for the others.

Tinkering with things is something I used to do all the time when I was a kid, especially with game creation tools and art. Somewhere over the years I stopped doing this naturally and forgot about this crucial concept altogether. Perhaps the fact that it became a conscious “concept” at all that speaks to what went wrong. I remember in college being exposed to the idea of existentialism - among other philosophies - and grew obsessed with it. This specific philosophy would permeate through my artwork, song-writing, and every other aspect of my life in the years that followed. My obsession grew to a point where I would always weigh the time something would take with my desire to do something - anything - and oddly I would spend more time doing nothing than I ever had before. I reached a point where normal adult responsibilities would overtake everything I could be doing, leaving room for nothing else. 

When I wasn’t worried about my responsibilities, I was wasting time debating whether or not it would be worth my time to do things like play a game or watch a movie vs. sketching, making music, or tinkering with a creative program that I’d paid for; because none of the latter would yield immediate results nor build up to something I felt I could use professionally. This is a terrible way of thinking, and led to a life of dissatisfaction. It has also led to a serious imbalance in my life, which was once full of unadulterated creativity toward any medium. Tinkering is an important part of creativity. It’s a willingness to throw oneself into an abyss of the unknown without worrying oneself with coming out with a product. The reality is that learning something is the end product of tinkering. 

For years I’d only gone into art and design projects seeking an end result that would be marketable. I only wanted to sell the things I created, and only created in the hopes of selling those things. Don’t do this, it’s bullshit. There is a time and place for selling oneself or one’s work, but not everything needs to be sellable. 

I had blocked myself off from personal growth and was only seeing my value in the form of likes on a social media post and dollar signs on completed projects. I felt pretty gross when I realized this. I wasted my post-college 20s theorizing, invalidating myself, wasting time, and then being frustrated by not making money doing something I once loved. All of this was a result of letting my love for tinkering dissipate. I lost any creative direction I once had.

Creating is important to me. It’s something I feel I should always be doing. Tinkering with various tools at the tips of my fingers - and not becoming gluttonous in expanding those tools infinitely - it’s a great place to start (even though it’s number 4 on my list).

With this little bit of context and backdrop, I think the importance of numbers 1 & 2 should now make more sense. I’m here, writing this journal, because I want to create games. That’s my long-term plan. I know making full-fledged games takes a long time, especially when starting out as a hobby. I’ve read countless accounts of people trying to shoot for the stars right away, falling flat on their faces. Start small, everyone says. Build something that functions, but not necessarily something that looks like a game (I got this bit of information from Unity’s pre-tutorial video, paraphrased of course).

I need to make something that functions. I need to finish something small. Even this is probably going to take a while. I have neither the time nor brain of my 12-year-old self. I’m also much more stubborn now, and when I struggle with something I don’t understand immediately, I often quit out of frustration. Not giving up should be one of my goals, actually. 

List number 2 is something I shouldn’t have any problem with; as an artist, I find myself perpetually drawn to - well - drawing. Pixel art is pretty new to me, because devoting myself to working on art at a computer is new to me. It’s something that was defined as its own field while I was in school: “Digital Media,” “Digital Illustration,” etc. It was kept separate from “traditional” art, which is frustrating to me now, looking back, and seeing now how integrated the two have become in today’s world. I decided to put all of my focus on traditional art in school, and regretted it ever since. But I’ve slowly been dabbling with animation and pixel art thanks to Aseprite, which makes it incredibly fluid and easy to practice, especially if one is already pretty well versed in Adobe’s creative programs.

The challenge for me here, similar to number 1, is sticking to it. Making a bunch of objects, characters, backgrounds and foregrounds; hoping to use these in future projects. This is why number 3 exists. Staying focused. Why is it so damn difficult for me to stay focused?

We live in a world of distractions. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t fight it anymore, nor do I want to - out of fear of becoming irrelevant or turning into one of those crotchety old luddites that pisses everyone off, because they push against technology like a baby that stubbornly closes their mouth every time their parents try to feed them. 

It’s hard to not be distracted by the beauty of the work other people are doing. Rather than being inspired by it and using it as a platform to aid my own work, I often let it discourage me. I see someone has done a thing and think, “I’ll never be that good.” And I continue to not be as good because I sulk about it rather than learn from it, or be inspired by it. It’s cool that we live in a world where so many people are creative and want to work in creative industries. Art brings people joy, amongst other things, and that’s been my mission statement this whole time. 

Staying focused on the tasks at hand is pretty important to me. Feeling encouraged by the work and world around me is something I desperately need to work on. I want to be a better artist for my own sake. I want to enjoy what I do, and I want to enjoy the process of getting there. 

Thanks for reading,

 Love always,

Ben/junior kaiju

[juniorkaiju-blog]

First post/Introduction

Hi, my name is Ben. 

I’m 31 years old at the time of writing this, and I’m from the Detroit area. I’ve spent the past 10 years of my life toiling and wasting my time on mostly trivial pursuits. That’s not to say I’ve wasted every moment of the last 10 years (nor that I didn’t have good times despite such time-wasting), but I’ve spent a large portion of it not knowing what I wanted to do with my life, going down dead-end roads, and making myself miserable in the process. I recognize misery is a part of being human. It gives us something to reflect upon in order to better ourselves, and without bad days we couldn’t have good ones: a philosophy I use frequently to justify why I’m so miserable sometimes. This preamble is to tell you - and remind me - of where I was mentally and emotionally when I decided, finally, that I want to make games for the rest of my life.

I’ve been to many job interviews and taken many college courses where they’ve asked, “where do you see yourself in 5, 10 years?” “Fuck, I don’t know,” I’d think, often replying to the prompt with some contrived answer in the way of “I want to grow in _____ skills.”

One night (in June 2018) I was preparing to go to bed. I had just listened to a good chunk of a recent episode of Steve Gaynor’s Tone Control podcast, where he interviews game developers about how they got started in the industry; and it pushed me, hard, into knowing what I should (and want!) be doing. On its own this statement sounds silly. “Oh some guy whose work you admire inspired you to do what he does for a living.” But for me, it wasn’t about Steve Gaynor’s career choices nor those of the person he interviewed; all they did was give me more insight into something I’ve always loved: games and how they’re made. I had just started a new job more in line with my college degree and was starting to realize more and more that this new job didn’t make me happy; in fact, it was making me miserable all over again. A story for another time, I suppose, but serves as evidence that merely changing something big in one’s life doesn’t mean that positivity will soon follow. 

For years I’ve wanted to work in video games, I just wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with them. I’ve dabbled in journalism/writing, I’ve cohosted a podcast and I’ve streamed games on Twitch - all with varying consistency. Or is it inconsistency? I don’t know. Hell, I even curated two art shows for my friends at Detroit Arcade Club focusing on characters from video games (something that lines up directly with my college degree). I enjoyed these things - the challenge, the subject matter, and the knowledge gained from them - but I knew even then that it wasn’t something I could see myself doing in 10 years. I’m not the most charismatic or social person these days, and a lot of these things require a certain self-confidence and leadership I lacked and didn’t attain through practicing them. Many people can and have - and good for them (not sarcastically speaking here)! I hope more people can find something they love and pursue it as a career, should that be their goal. Which, after an exhaustive few paragraphs, brings me back to my point: I want to make video games because I’ve always loved video games. They make me happy, and I want to make things that bring joy to the lives of others.

At some of the darkest points in my life, many over the last 10 years, video games have always left an immense impact. In the last year alone, I played Hollow Knight when my wife had to go to back home to Canada for a week to help her sick mother. This was the longest we’d been apart since getting married (I know, it’s only a week. I have dependency issues. I’ll get over it). I played Night in the Woods after my grandmother passed away, which happened to be the week the game came out, and it helped me understand and accept the changes life would force upon me, and the changes that I personally made, for better or worse, and taught me how to grow from/with them. These games taught me more about myself, in a way, and they brought me joy at very difficult times in my life. If you haven’t played them yet, please do.

My goal with this devlog/blog/whatever, is to show what I’m working on, share my learning processes and steps I’m taking to achieve my goals, and grow as a human and developer. I’m not always funny, I’m not always profound, and I’m not always making the best decisions, so if you happen to be reading something that you have a better solution for, that’s what comments and messages are for. I’m not planning to use this platform as a means for social engagement in the way that twitter and Instagram and shit are there for (I’ve spent too many hours of my life in these spaces as it is). But I am certainly hoping to make friends - be it people that like my work, people whose work I like, and people I feel comfortable sharing my thoughts and feelings with. For now, this is all I have to say. Just a bunch of loose thoughts on why I’m even here in the first place. The next thing I’ll post will be more game focused -  though I should be honest - I’m very early in my game development learning. I’ll write more about my influences, my artwork and where I’m drawing suggestions and information from, but as of right now I’ve been focusing my attention on learning Pico-8 from Lexaloffle, learning how to make decent pixel art in Aseprite, and have been jotting down ideas to hopefully take into Game Maker once I have a basic understanding of the skeleton that makes a game function. Or is it the beating heart? Maybe the brain? Fuck it. 

Thanks for listening/reading.

Love,

Ben (Junior Kaiju)