So my Kickstarter quietly (but I suppose not unexpectedly) failed yesterday, though backers did pledge to contribute $785 of the requested $9,000. Which isn’t completely horrible for spending no time building an audience. But it wasn’t nearly enough, so unfortunately there won’t be a book on melody from me in 2016. Not sure yet if I’ll try to build an audience and try another Kickstarter later, or if I’ll find some other way to find the time. But it’s back to being on the back-burner for now.
Other than that, I’m still learning the ins and outs of Unity3D. I’m confident I can learn the programming side with more practice and experience; Unity is so much more convenient and intuitive than the engines I fooled around with a bit more than a decade ago in high school. (I could swear I used to understand quaternions when I was in high school. Not that I really need to understand them now, as Unity takes care of them, but I still want to understand them again, if I ever really did.)
I’m also not worried about game design. Though I don’t really have much practical experience with it (beyond daydreaming), it is the fun part of game development. Writing, designing puzzles, storytelling, etc… Those are what excite me about game development in the first place. I would never have bothered to learn GW-BASIC when I was in elementary school if storytelling through video games didn’t excite me.
What I don’t have any experience with is creating art for games. Modeling, texturing, or drawing in general. And since I can’t afford to hire freelancers, that’s something I’m going to have to learn, and a skill I’d love to have anyway. Though I may try programming a game that features purely abstract shapes to circumvent the need for art, I still want to create adventure games at some point, and those will require some modeling and texturing skills.
So there’s that fun stuff, and of course I’ve still got some novels I’m working on…