Wednesday 15 July 2015

Directions to Nowhere

This post needs to start with a blurb about flash. Flash has been the program I've always used for everything creative I do. I've toyed with Java and script editors, but nothing's ever came to fruition for RO stuff from it. All I've done (for visual things at least) has been in exclusively flash.
Woes of player vulnerabilities had me stop and think about how that monopoly has existed since I tried to bring back RO stuff in '08.
Before then I was using a program called pivot, which was super simplistic to put it simply. The most it could support was .gif if my memory serves me well. It was amazing when I was learning.
In fact, when I started flash stuff I hated it. I didn't understand the program at all. My friend PJ was the first to wrap his head around the program, and I caught up only once he moved on from animation. The timing was unfortunate but frankly he made a good call scrapping animation, it's a headache of a format.
I say that not because it's hard to animate (Which it is, Animation is time consuming and tedious work) but because the means to turn animating professional are very difficult. Youtube is far from a viable option due to its time-watched to revenue ratio. Patreon is an option but unless you're making consistent contributions to youtube, won't help much. Plus you need to make something interesting enough to captivate people to even see your work. Working at a studio requires years of schooling. (Outside my reach...) My ultimate problem is I'm an idiot as an animator because I'm self-taught, so it's hard to take it seriously, or as anything but a hobby.
That and I'm set on my ways, so my drawing methods don't really improve. That and finding time for animating is difficult. And when times not the problem, ideas are. Or scripting. Or writing. Or drive. Organization is hard for me as always...

I give myself a headache, haha.

With all that said, I've started messing around in Unity. It's even more difficult to learn (seemingly) but is a 3D game making engine. The possibilities are endless for game-making (Which I had before said I was stepping away from, but I really can't decide what creative thing I wanna focus on...I'm sure that's not helping my -1000000% productivity...lol)
The reason I have looked into unity, first and foremost, is I see it as the progressive step past flash. Secondly though, Making games with it gives me the potential to make something for Steam Greenlight.
It's not like NG, where it's free-to-upload, but the potential to succeed is much higher. First and foremost, if the game is 'greenlit', passes inspection and makes it to market, copies of the game become available for purchase. That means revenue, which is something that is very difficult to achieve with the way I've been approaching things on NG. I've learned from NG how to understand copyrights, which means if i did make something for greenlight I know I'd make something free of copyright infringements. (Actually Saint Riccy was free of copyright infringements too, hence why I make the claim. I was extremely careful to use public domain stuff and creative commons stuff when I couldn't do something myself.)
The hard part is actually making a game. Unity is new to me, and theoretically I could make a game in flash and find a way to make the swf an executible and use that, but part of me wants to try Unity. And part of me wants to leave the Jenny games for NG, for free, forever.

I'm the hardest to work with, no wonder I'm always alone in these projects lol.

Also I'm playing with the idea of moving away from just the "RO 6" (Ric, Amy, Jenny, Tino, Tim, Taylor)

Lots on the mind, but I've no time to do anything with that. So nothings happening, but I'm playing in Unity now. And I like steam. And Greenlight entices me.

That's this entire post. Should've just read the last 3 lines, rofl.