Tinkering

 As I look back on Old Skies in its current state, and try to work out my strengths and weaknesses at the moment, it occurs to me that my favourite aspect of game development is the act of tinkering about with a project. For me, tooling about in an engine or a piece of pixel art software was a bit like messing about with an electronics set - a chance to connect things together and see how they work, try to fix things that aren't working, and the chance to see something come to life. That's what drew me into game development in the first place.

When my focus shifted from writing functions and designing interactivity to making art, I found other ways to tinker - trying to find new ways of making cool graphics, learning different processes that added things to my toolbox of skills. It's always satisfying to me to do something that I didn't know how to do previously. Doing something I already knew how to do is satisfying, too, but in a different way.

I never really enjoyed making background art for games until I managed to find the fun in it, to break it down like that electronics kit into a series of steps that eventually results in something that works. I firmly believe that if you take someone and get them to do the thing that they truly care about, you can get great work out of anybody. For me, I think I need to find out how to tinker with the areas of my current work that are weaknesses, because that's what drives me. 

It's important to me to produce good amounts of work, of course, one only has to peek at my todo lists to understand that if I didn't, things would very quickly be very bad for me. But I think if I can find that happy medium between tinkering and productivity in all current areas that I'm working in, the end result will be a better game. Can I make "character animations" part of that electronics kit? I guess it's something to work on!