My goal in life

I had a dream. It was a very ambitious dream, yet also a pretty common one. What was it? To become an astronaut, so I could go to space and see its wonders for myself.

The road to become one, however, is long and hard. There are many skills one has to learn, and a lot of physical training one has to undergo to achieve it. Could I make it if I started today, and dedicated every day of my life improving myself physically and mentally? Maybe. But I would have to play catch-up with everyone else.

My life experience has been different from most. I'm not all that good at physical activities, I stopped doing martial arts because I couldn't handle it anymore, plus I have a problem with my left foot that causes me trouble if I do certain kinds of movements. I haven't studied all that much in my schooling years either, and I'm fairly certain I don't have any grades on any subject lying around, but even the one that I do have, that got me my current job, feels like it was more of a "he did good enough" than actual evidence of my skills in that area.

I'd have to train a lot of basic things, just so I could qualify to for the more advanced ones, and that would make it take a lot longer to complete. I decided that space is a dream that's just too far away from my reach.

There is, however, another one. It's not quite as strong as the first, but it's there, and it's so close that I can almost touch it. And with it, I think "So what if I can't go to space? I'll just have space come to me!" (I hope I used the expression correctly in this case, or I might look mighty silly right about now)

Live to create, one step at a time, each step a bit closer to your dreams

Game design, as a passion, is really hard for me. I'm continuously learning new things about myself that I didn't even think I had, and every time I do, my outlook changes. But when I feel that I've reached my end, when game design feels like it's just not worth it and I leave, I always come back to it. Every. Single. Time.

I realized: While I want to achieve my own dreams, to make the things I truly want to make, I can't ignore the smaller, less grandiose projects that help me achieve those dreams. They deserve to be loved just as much as I would love my own child, for without them, I wouldn't be half the designer I think I am.

I may not be able to go to space, but what I do while I remain on this planet can inspire others to look up at the stars themselves, and maybe, just maybe, one of them will be so inspired that they will make it their own dream to head up there, and train themselves every day in order to achieve that dream.

If that happens, then I will live the rest of my life satisfied with what I have been able to do with it.

~Jonas 'Taroku' Jakobsen


P.S. We both know that I can't keep a regular schedule, so I won't even pretend that I can anymore. These posts will just have to be written whenever I feel like it :P I also tend to switch in and out of whatever project I'm working on, (Which is apparently not uncommon for game makers) so I wont talk about them unless I feel I actually have something interesting to talk about.

P.S. This post is brought to you by: Space Brothers! The anime about two brothers training to become astronauts!

Quick update, and a new project

...Wow, it sure has been a while, huh?

So yeah, a lot of things has happened these past few months. Especially the last one was really turbulent for me emotionally, and none of them have really helped me get better at game making. But I am slowly creeping forwards, and I've bought some new materials to hopefully improve my creative flow. But there's still a lot to do, and a lot of things this humble hobbyist needs to learn.

In other news, my newest project has me trying to learn how AIs work, and how I can best code and design them. This would be relatively straight-forward if not for one thing: These AIs are for a social simulator, so I'm trying to make them act like people instead of drones that are trying to shoot you.

Except I'm trying to simplify it to hopefully make the whole thing easier to create, while also trying to make the gameplay more streamlined. For this reason, I'm eliminating natural language from the game in favor of a simplified communication system, and have the game be in a cartoony style to hopefully eliminate any conflicting aesthetics. My reasoning is that trying to make natural language work for this type of game seems to be too big of a problem, and I think I can do better if I used a simpler method instead.

Another thing I'm trying out is to introduce stats that represents the PC's emotional state, which the player will have to manage in order to progress, making the player serve as the characters rational mind. This should hopefully make sense once I reveal more of the game in the future.


That's all for now. I'll do my best to update this blog more often from now on. (I'm aiming for weekly/bi-weekly!) Fingers crossed!

Cyberbugs

Earlier today, while I was exploring one of the nearby toy shops, I discovered an interesting little example of robotic toys.

I didn't take any pictures of them, but they were featured as behaving a whole lot like insects. They would move around like insects, and if you flip them over, they would flip back on their feet again.

I don't remember much else about their features, except for the arenas you build for them, but that's not really what's important right now.

When I saw them, I was immediately intrigued. I've dealt with building robots before, but for some reason, I never found it enjoyable. These robots however, were complete. And while, in the end, I figured that they would be uninteresting to play with, they did trigger a thought: what if every part of the robot was interchangeable? And not only that, but what if every piece added, or changed, could determine the behavior of the larger whole?

I've never felt that building robots from scratch was particularly interesting. But the idea of an already completed robot that changed itself depending on its parts captivated me. It's like a building set, or Lego if that's easier, where its programming is already done, you just have to give it the necessary parts to make it function the way you want it to.

The question that immediately popped up was: "what can I do with it?" Two ideas came to mind:

1) Despite the quality that's normal for games that are based on a license, I've always found those games where the hero has to win some really big tournament particularly interesting. But whatever good ideas I found in them were either implemented in the story exclusively or indeed in the mechanics, but in a horribly underdeveloped state.

I think it might be interesting to have a game about putting together a robot like I described it earlier. A bit like a puzzle game come to think of it.

2) You guys remember Star Trek: Bridge Commander, right? That game where the player spends all of their time in a first-person perspective in the captain's chair? I used to really like that game, and while games like FTL (Faster Than Light) do an amazingly good job at giving you the feeling of being the captain of a spaceship, I still wish to see another experiment with the first-person approach.

You've probably already guessed what I'm getting at: Your station officers;  the pieces of the larger whole, that being the spaceship.

What if every officer had their own way of using a system? Giving them an order and then see them carry it out in their own way? It would really make you question who you should assign to a specific station based on not only their skill, but on their behavior.

Unfortunately, I'm already quite busy with some other things at the moment. (Like learning a new development tool!) I'm afraid I'll have to leave this aside until something happens that makes me dig this back up again.


[Edit] I forgot to mention this earlier, but a special thank-you goes out to Loki-Lou for proofreading this post to make sure it was readable. :)

The Obligatory First Post of a New Blog!

Good day madams, gentlemen, and everything else in between. You've probably already figured my name, (Or at least the one I use on the communication network that is the Internet) so I'm going to skip that, and instead talk about what I do: I make games.

Well... WANT to is the more correct way of saying it, (I can already hear some of you sigh) but we all have to start somewhere! Not everyone has spend the majority of their childhood engrossed in whatever we've chosen as our creative outlet; some of us have to wait till we're in our 20s before we even get the drive to seek one out to begin with!

Now lets finish this introduction before I dig this hole even deeper.

I've played video games for my whole life. Ever since I was a little kid, age 6 or thereabout, I've played games like The Settlers, Hostile Waters, Oni and Omikron: The Nomad Soul. All of these games are for the PC, and I consider it my primary gaming platform. I could go on about my sizable collection of games, but then I'd only be bragging. And that is, I must say, quite boring. Believe me, I tried.

So after all that, what is this blog for exactly?

It's very simple really: I'm planning to use this blog for game ideas, possible projects, and general musings about games and their designs. As it is for things like this, it can go in about as many directions as a beam of light through a glass of water. Let's just hope that it's a good direction.

So now that the obligatory introduction is done, my next post will actually be about games, so stay tuned!


PS. -Special thanks goes out to Sonji Goodman & Loki-Lou for helping me come up with a name for this blog, for their support, and for their general greatness which I can only hope to achieve!