Séance 2 has been delivered + received, and backed up as another hour or so of archive material ready for the 100th year anniversary of the old band. Everything went OK. I noticed we had a few moments of choppiness but no screen going pitch black music turns into the beegees backwards through a phone speaker… no, sitting glaring at the computers daring them to fuck up seems to have done the trick.
Doesn’t mean I wasn’t anxious. Dear god was I anxious. But the show went ahead and we had a little lunch after to celebrate. I then packed it all up … and fell into a deep depression. Par for the course after you deliver months of continuous work in just over an hour. Taken a bit less than a week to crawl back to the drawing board. How now?
The games are priority. I should:
- Finish repairing and updating the combination of HH and Snowglobe. This is at about 65% completion but I’m having some doubts that need a think before soldiering on.
- Start on Luna. I know the doubts here. It’s become too bloody big. It eats months in one gulp. It is something that needs a entire factory of workers.
- Then there’s something else…
Some of my doubts about Snowglobe are centred around the original cause for the game. It was to be colourful and sinister, magical in geography – a musical. HH was a 3D game that tended to the 2D side of the culture. I have previously written a post mortem about this problem:
… specifically warning myself about the pitfalls of realism. But I think I’ve begun to impose a poor version of realism on the remake. And I’m in danger of thinking that way about Luna. I need to break out of this mode of thought because it is grinding and officious without actually bringing the anarchic joy that such a project should give.
So I’ve started investigating 2D engines for a simpler game/gallery, because 2D will protect it from imitating the real world. When I learn some lessons from this I can then go back and deliver – not a poor replica of the World Expo – but the magical aspects of it.
I am lucky to have started this blog and can go back and ask my 2012 self what to do. He’s a big help sometimes. UPDATE – I’ve just put a lot of effort into finding an replacing old blog entries, and 2009 in particular has been much repaired.
Hullo! I found a video of (I belive it was) you playing the knobs on a PDP-12 back when the LCM was still around. The caption said that as a result of this visit, a PDP-12 featured in “The Interactive Fiction Game [H.H.]”. I’ve been trying to see if this game is around anywhere, as I’m currently tinkering with cramming interactive fiction into a PDP-12.