At the start of the year I began working on Postal Worker, a game for the iPhone based on an idea that I came up with at GCAP in Melbourne at the end of 2009, while talking with a couple of mates over coffees in the hotel bar. I was totally psyched, and gave myself a 100-hour deadline to get the game done and dusted. I started by building a game engine on top of AirPlay SDK. It was fun, and I was making good progress.
Then Global Game Jam suddenly loomed, and I decided to put the Postal Worker project in pause mode so I could hack out a game in 48 hours. I took the opportunity to learn ActionScript, and made a dinky little flip-screen arcade adventure called Bogus Quest. I spent the week following GGJ adding new features to the game and fixing some bugs. I still have a list of things that I want to do, including adding a proper loading screen and adding sound effects.
Then Mike Turner came and raided the Interzone offices, and I became involved with spreading the word about what happened in an attempt to get the Australian government to actually do something about it. A lot of people have been seriously disadvantaged by all of this, but, at the same time, there was a great sense of camaraderie, and it was quite a lot of fun analysing documents, editing video and basically getting the word out to journalists.
Tonight I realised that I’ve got three hobby projects on the go. I’m a self-proclaimed procrastinating perfectionist, by which I mean that I have a bunch of crazy ideas but never actually get around to completing any of them, out of fear of failure. Ask me about Magnate, my web scraper cum news aggregator, or my procedurally generated text adventure, or MegaHAL10 (the next version of the chatterbot I wrote 15 years ago), or Thrust Harder, or dBoard, or SpeedReader, or Fanglr. All projects that I’ve been incredibly excited about, and all terribly incomplete.
Well, no more. I’m going to manage my push-down stack, and make sure that I always go back to and complete projects that were interrupted. I won’t stop the interruptions. They’re fun. But I will make my default activity finishing the current project, whatever that might be.
So look out for a blog post about Bogus Quest soon. And, after that, keep your eyes peeled for Postal Worker 13. I promise!
2 Comments
all good lloyd
Mr Kransky,
For a minute there from the title, I thought you were launching into another game, called “Push-Down Stack” – think about it… possibly a good idea for a game. You can have that one for free :)
DrewFX.
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