First, I want to apologise for the lack of updates recently. I’ve been kind of hovering in that state where every night I’m saying, “I’m not quite ready to post an update, but almost. Surely I’ll have something ready for tomorrow!” (we miss you, Leslie Nielsen) I promise, a proper update on my game tomorrow.
Today I went to do some test videos for the master class series that I’ve mentioned a few times before. The nice folks at MediaSaints are fantastic to work with, and very patient with a guy like me who’s not naturally good in front of cameras. I’m not expecting to actually use the videos we shot today, but they’re giving me an idea of what works and what doesn’t work with internet video at various resolutions, and just how much work I still have in front of me! Cutting content down to fit into 15 minutes is actually turning out to be a bit of a problem, and I kind of feel like I’ve been racing to cover topics in that amount of time; I’d really like to be able to slow down a bit and take my time. Which means choosing slightly smaller topics, at least to start off. But it’s tricky, as the topics all interrelate with each other; it’s been quite difficult to pick out a topic that I could cover first!
The aftermath has been interesting, though; after the anxiety of driving to MediaSaints through pounding rain (with extremely low visibility), and then the anxiety of spending three hours in a dark room with blazing hot lights shining on me, a video camera pointed menacingly in my direction, and under orders to be spontaneous and natural.. well, my mood’s been all over the place for the rest of the day; first it was general restlessness, and then some mild feelings of doom and gloom about my future set in. Those latter feelings are still lingering now, but I’m pretty certain that they’re just the last remnants of today’s adrenaline hit; I expect that I’ll be feeling fine again tomorrow.
But with those shifting moods, I’ve been absolutely useless for getting any real coding done for the rest of the day today. In the end, I gave up on accomplishing anything and just installed Cataclysm, spent a few minutes trying to figure out how best to leave Dalaran (luckily, it was much easier for me than it was for poor Shamus), and then had a brief fly over Stormwind (which makes me want to get back to MMORPG Tycoon 2 as soon as possible). In total, I spent approximately 30 minutes with Cataclysm, which seems like $40 well spent, right? It’s kind of weird; the only reason I wanted Cataclysm was to be able to fly over Stormwind and see it from that high vantage point, as inspiration for MT2.
Anyhow, as I mentioned above, I do expect that my mood and attention span will be back to normal tomorrow, once the adrenaline is finally all flushed back out of my system, and I ought to be able to finish up the code I need to get my iPhone game to its “first playable” state. Once that happens, I’ll post a full discussion about it here, along with “next steps” and future plans and so forth.
