What creative project are you working on?

[Koobie]

Hey there fellow Massassians,

What creative projects are you working on? Mods, programs, games, writing? What are the challenges? The potential pay-off?

I personally have started work on a space opera called Space Abyss I plan to self-publish, a projected 5-book series. Last time I published a book was in 2014, and a short story -- back in 2009! I'm also writing short stories I can hopefully sell to afford a good cover and some promotoion.

I want to write 2,000 words a day for the book and between 5,000 and 10,000 words a week for the short stories. It's more than I've ever written and so far I can barely squeeze 300 words a day out of myself. But then again, I'd just started doing something after 2 years of lying in bed and reading books (for 2 yeras straight) on strong anti-psychotics (I have a disability pension I give to my mom, with whom I live), so it's better than nothing.

I really hope for the series to eventually make me a decent living so I can better financially support myself and my family.

Wish me luck.

What about you?

[Nikumubeki]

Since the main lesson from my 2027.35 € UE4 Failure was "oh, my copypaste editing methods that worked with TODOA and DXN aren't sufficient anymore!", FGR has been dead for years. I occasionally upload a virtual studio abuse sporadically every now and then, though.

Best of luck to you, Koobie!

[Koobie]

Thanks!

Why 2027.35 €? Did you have to license UE4 somehow? I thought it was free.

[Nikumubeki]

Oh, it is. I just kept on buying assets all over the place (not just on Epic's website) until a possible UnrealEngine.com password leak issue made me quit, and then I realized how much money I had spent on everything. Whoops!

[Nikumubeki]

Also, this is as far as I got with the UE4 Failure, and it's not even using most of the assets that I bought: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1iyh...ew?usp=sharing

[Gebohq]

I've been working on a tabletop RPG module intended to be played in a single session. It uses and is set in the Alien:RPG setting, though the scenario itself is very much emulating John Carpenter's 1982 version of "The Thing" with other influences including other Thing works as well as At The Mountains of Madness. I'll be running my first playtest of it this coming Tuesday night, so we'll see how well I've done with it then.

[SMLiberator]

What creative projects are you working on?

oh boy, it's JKGR time

Mods, programs, games, writing?

...yes
in reality it's a mod, but it stands pretty much as a full game of its own which just happens to use the JK executable. There's a lot of writing to be done, both conceptually in planning the story, characters, quests, missions, locations etc; but also in literal writing (or rather, typing) for all quest dialogue and NPC interactions, which should be crazy extensive. In terms of programming, I need an external program to read COG data and save it externally so I can autosave and keep progress between launches of the game as there is no way in hell I can count with JK's savegame system. I mean, FGR's TODOA couldn't, and (at least in terms of code, and code only) JKGR is certainly miles more complex than that or anything else ever made for the engine (except perhaps DBZTDiR or some of Edward's weird stuff, but I wouldn't count on that).

What are the challenges?

at the moment, designing levels in JED. I wish I could make outdoor environments that looked as good as Ruthven's and urban environments that looked as good as zanardi's (also, I really wish zanardi released these levels - I'd love to put some JKGR cars in them), but come to think of it, these levels are actually either relatively tiny or made entirely out of 3dos, and neither are good for what I need. My levels are kind of required to be insanely large (at least by JK standards) as they're open world settings rather than linear closed environments (or small arenas) like JK levels are. Other than that, finding a way to reliably save games externally has also shown to be a headache. I've made some not-completely-unsuccessful attempts before, but these were far from stable or reliable. I wish I could be half as good with C or C++ as I am with COG. There's also random crashes every once in a while but that's probably just JK being JK and wouldn't hurt that much if I could get savegames to function.

The potential pay-off?

literally absolutely nothing other than seeing products of my imagination come to life (also becoming the self-awarded best JK modder of all time hehehe). I can't see anyone having any interest in this project other than people who played JK a lot going "oh, look what's he's done with JK, that's pretty cool", but it also deviates too much from JK for it to really be attractive. Like, if someone made a FPS out of Need for Speed I'd be like "wow, that's crazy", but why would anyone go for Need for Speed when looking for a FPS?


Its probably high time I switched to another engine, but I really don't fancy the idea of having to relearn how to work with a new engine after literally more than a decade modding JK, plus all the resources that would be lost (also I don't have 2k euros to spend on assets hehe)...


Other than that, I also make music which I write and produce on my own (on Audacity, as just like with JK, I couldn't get myself to learn anything else when I've been so used to that), which I've released some of in various platforms but never really shown it to anyone other than some close friends. Part of the reason for that is that I kind of hate the way I sound, but I really don't want anyone else singing the personal lyrics I wrote for the songs I compose, so I have to find a way to get better at singing even though I can barely sing at home since everyone's home 24/7 due to the pandemic. I do have a side project (cw: Metal!!) however with a friend of mine who just happened to become rather big on TikTok (some 420k+ followers) a couple of months ago, and I'm really eager to see what impact that will have for whatever music we release on the future, although that probably won't be happening until the pandemic is over... which definitely won't be anytime soon because we live in Bolsonaro's Brazil, the literal worst country in the world in handling COVID-19!!!!!!

Also good luck for you guys, hope all goes well with your personal projects !


Which is proper grammar, "an FPS" (as in "an Eff-Pee-Ass") or "a FPS" (as in "a First-Person Shooter")?

[saberopus]

an FPS

[Nikumubeki]

fips

[Nikumubeki]

literally absolutely nothing other than seeing products of my imagination come to life (also becoming the self-awarded best JK modder of all time hehehe). I can't see anyone having any interest in this project other than people who played JK a lot going "oh, look what's he's done with JK, that's pretty cool", but it also deviates too much from JK for it to really be attractive

JKGR should definitely be its own separate (SITH engine) game, but of course that'd more or less require a project like OpenJKDF2 to be finished

[Impi]

I've been working on a tabletop RPG module intended to be played in a single session. It uses and is set in the Alien:RPG setting, though the scenario itself is very much emulating John Carpenter's 1982 version of "The Thing" with other influences including other Thing works as well as At The Mountains of Madness. I'll be running my first playtest of it this coming Tuesday night, so we'll see how well I've done with it then.

Nice, I'm also currently working on a DnD oneshot for me and my friends. A zombie-thingy, where the players of course do not know that there will be zombies. A potion nerd (with pimples, and social awkwardness and everything) has poisened the well and everyone who drinks from it will turn into a zombie in the next ten minutes (oh, how I hope that one of my players will drink from it). He did it to get back at his school bullys and woo the lady of his dreams. But first he has to go down into the sewers (potentially with the players) to retrieve a magic crown that actually lets him control the zombies.

And I've created a dinosaur RPG to play with my kids. We've played a little bit and they liked it, but so far we parents didn't have the energy to continue.

[Gebohq]

Nice, I'm also currently working on a DnD oneshot for me and my friends. A zombie-thingy, where the players of course do not know that there will be zombies. A potion nerd (with pimples, and social awkwardness and everything) has poisened the well and everyone who drinks from it will turn into a zombie in the next ten minutes (oh, how I hope that one of my players will drink from it). He did it to get back at his school bullys and woo the lady of his dreams. But first he has to go down into the sewers (potentially with the players) to retrieve a magic crown that actually lets him control the zombies.

And I've created a dinosaur RPG to play with my kids. We've played a little bit and they liked it, but so far we parents didn't have the energy to continue.

Neato! I'm hoping I can rope my sister's kids into roleplaying and such when they move back around where I live (should be about a year and a half from now). I won't be doing so with the Alien system though, they're a bit young for that, at least not without dialing back the R-rated materials. Then again, her son read Jurassic Park recently, so maybe not as much dialing back for him, hah!

[SMLiberator]

OpenJKDF2

I've been looking at that for a while and am really interested despite having genuinely no idea what it really is or how it works. The fact I couldn't compile it doesn't really help either

[Impi]

Neato! I'm hoping I can rope my sister's kids into roleplaying and such when they move back around where I live (should be about a year and a half from now). I won't be doing so with the Alien system though, they're a bit young for that, at least not without dialing back the R-rated materials. Then again, her son read Jurassic Park recently, so maybe not as much dialing back for him, hah!

My youngest was five when we started playing. And she had no problems with using her t-rex to bite some velociraptors in half to eat them and later having a civil conversation with the survivors.

[Phantom-Seraph]

I feel like I've got a never-ending backlog of projects I'm picking at with my limited free time, but I don't feel like talking about unfinished projects because after I do I tend to stop working on them.
So recently I finished some assets for a youtube channel I'm helping with some rebranding.
The channel has 3 hosts who each run a different series during the week and though I'm still in the process of rebranding two of the shows I recently finished the assets for their weekly news series: 7DOS (7 Days of Science.)

The tree logo represents the entire channel while the newsroom is specifically for 7DOS.

When the host isn't able to film I built a cardboard stand-in for him. As seen here:


Normally the pay for this one wouldn't be worth the effort, but it gave me an opportunity and a no-pressure timeline to switch over to improve my 3D skills and workflow while devoting the majority of my time to raising my daughters.

[Brian]

That's so cool (the cardboard guy).

I was creatively relaxing on the couch and then I had to come ban Koobie again

[Eversor]

I had to come ban Koobie again

that's too bad. The JFK thread had a lot of potential

[SMLiberator]

The JFK thread had a lot of potential

Granted, I don't think the hit was in fact ordered by Kruschev

[Nikumubeki]

Even in its short lifespan, Koobie's Trump thread was indistinguishable from the other one

[Wookie06]

It's too bad Koobie couldn't control himself when he came back, however it is that he came to be back amongst us. I thought this was an interesting topic. I've been wanting to progress on a youtube channel for sometime. I uploaded a couple videos nearly two years ago now. One was for a $100 rebate so that was a no brainer.

I've had several ideas for channels but, basically, somebody is already doing it and doing it better than I would have done. For example, when Kong: Skull Island was an upcoming film I thought it would be cool to do a retrospective series on big ape films. I even came up with a channel name, one that worked for ape films specifically as well as all films generally. Then I happened across Cinemassacre's series on the exact same topic and, of course, he's not the only one to do so.

It occurred to me that one thing I know better than anybody else is my pickup truck and I have done interesting modifications and have many more planned all with functionality, practicality, and/or modernizing the vehicle in mind so that's my unproductive channel with two mediocre videos at the moment. I would say that will be changing within six months.

Right now I have an attic storage project underway which is going to facilitate me completely changing how the space in two of my rooms and my garage is used and I hope greatly improve several aspects of my/our life. And I'll let you in on a little secret. I've had this idea that, if money were no object, I would design a house with an attic level that when you go up the stairs into it you are essentially walking up the ramp to the Millennium Falcon and the entire house would be designed to accommodate an attic with the correct layout. I can't do that here but I can do some sort of starship/scifi theme. That will probably be a long term aspect to the project though.

[Baconfish]

I've got a collection of various bits and pieces of songs that I've never actually finished, but honestly I'm too tired/depressed to do anything creative anymore.

[Nikumubeki]

Yeah, one of the reasons why I'm endlessly revising TODOA every other year is because when I played through ME1 in 2013, I realized that my "original" sci-fi project had already been made. As for my "original" Deus Ex-a-like FGR thing: Cyberpunk 2077.

Sad.

[Wookie06]

I've got a collection of various bits and pieces of songs that I've never actually finished, but honestly I'm too tired/depressed to do anything creative anymore.

I know the feeling. I've got a collection of various bits and pieces of many unfinished projects, quite literally in some cases, all over the house and often feel too tired/stressed to get done. I find that small victories are great for morale can lead to larger accomplishments. Whatever it is that's got you down I wish you the best.