The Dragon's Talon

Herein, I will go off on one about writing in a stream-of-consciousness oupouring.  Feel free to tune out, I won’t be offended.  Or hitch a ride in my fevered imagination and thought-processes…

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Cut loose from big-business, I suppose I am free to consider myself a freelancer or an indie, but the last thing I want to be is a bum.  I need to stay active, to keep getting my ideas down on (digital or literal) paper or I will go mad.  Unemployment does not suit me, but working on my own projects while I find gainful employment is enough for now.  Of course, better than ‘stay active’ is ‘work toward independence’ and at least two people have actually congratulated me on my redundancy because it got me out of the rat-race.

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Apologies for the silence.

As some people will know, the company I worked for laid off some staff and I was one of those selected for redundancy.  This means that I have been a little preoccupied recently, but it is not all doom and gloom.  For the foreseeable future, I will be freelancing; this means networking (it’s a pity I just missed the Develop Conference / Expo) and looking for contract work.

I also have a little something I am working on, but it’s still top-secret for now.  Sorry…

I try to be a writer, good or bad, and I even manage it from time to time. The trouble is that I procrastinate and fail to finish, or else I get something out that I am almost embarrassed to show people.

I think this needs to change, so I need a deadline and a nudge.  I get these enough at work, but let’s not get into that; I like having an income…

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This was in a UK print-magazine a few months back, but only just published online, so it might be familiar to some UK developers.

Let’s start with a sound-bite…

“Firstly, a writer should learn to think through the structure of interactive scenes in terms of Boolean variables and secondly, they should abandon all thoughts of dialogue trees.”
- http://www.develop-online.net/features/905/The-Conversation

It would be a bit unfair to judge the whole article on that one statement, so go and read it.

First and foremost, I have to say that I got a little hot under the collar when I started reading it.  How can he possibly say these things?

After a while, I started to see where he was coming from.

Finally, I found myself nodding along.  He makes some good points and, in all fairness, I have already been doing things that way (with some small dialogue trees) for a while.  I have always favoured the non-linear, almost parallel finite-state machines, approach to storylines.

Where I differ is on his assertion that we need to kill off dialogue trees; to me, I think dialogue and storyline are two different beasts.  In my experience, they are often written by two different people.  He is saying that storylines work best with Booleans, which I agree with, but then using that as a justification for killing off a technique for dialogue.

So what do you make of it?  Do you agree, do you disagree or is he just stating the obvious?

A quick one; I have been accused of being a communist for my support of Free and Open-Source Software.  Using Linux is therefore akin to joining the Party and worshipping Marx.  Amusingly, the latest accusation came as a certain group raised over a million dollars between them by following a “free as in ‘Free speech’, not as in ‘free beer’” mindset.

Four indie games (Gish, Lugaru HD, Aquaria and Penumbra) recently went open source, making $1,273,613 for a coalition of developers (not all of whom went open-source) and charities.  In the end, each of these companies made $166,733.37 for their efforts and gave Child’s Play (a charity who give toys and games to children in hospitals) $188,583.92, as well as giving the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a charity who help oppose legislation and other legal threats to information) $183,607.34 just from this one act of going open-source.

I don’t know about you comrade, but I think that looks like a good capitalist venture from here…

This is something I wrote about a month ago as an example of an interactive script.  It is not great, but it was done in one night and I am quite happy with the female protagonist.  The prompt was “realistic, maybe slightly gritty” and I think I am quite happy, considering this is outside my normal style.

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This week, I think I will not have a writing exercise up .  As an apology, I offer you an older story; this is actually a prologue of sorts to a D&D campaign that was originally started in second edition and later played for a time in fourth edition.  I confess that it is fantasy, my default ‘go to’ genre, but I hope it serves as an example of my style which is not so formal as A Prince of Shadows, nor trying to be self-contained when it clearly is not.

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The fourth in a series of articles chronicling my output from writing exercises, this is less about ‘good writing’ and more about working to constraints without over-thinking them.

The aim this time was to finish a 750-word exercise with the words “…and I realised how lucky I was” by any means necessary.  The opening was actually taken from a notebook of mine.  (like any good writer / designer, I always keep one handy)  It was a line that came to me three or four years ago while waiting outside a library for my wife to finish work, but I never found a story to go with it.

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The third in a series of articles chronicling my output from writing exercises, this is less about ‘good writing’ and more about working to constraints without over-thinking them.

The aim this time was to finish a 750-word exercise with the words “…and he watched.  What else could he do?” to help get these words (paraphrased from a children’s book my daughter loves) out of my wife’s head.  I am not sure how much help I was, but it also gave me the chance to get Jack Flint down on the page before he finished driving me crazy.  I managed to restrict myself to only 49 words over the target, but I am treating these targets as being more like guidelines than rules or limits.

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