December 2019 - Week 12 - Prologue Pains

Summary

• Struggles with writing a story
• UWP regrets

Detail

First step: Learn how to write a story.

I've enjoyed a number of Neil Gaiman's novels over the years so my interest was piqued by a Masterclass advert that got through to me on YouTube about six months ago. There are a number of writing masterclasses and one on game design by Will Wright so I figured a year's subscription was going to be worthwhile. I also got a subscription for free in their sale which I can give away as a reward with a special tier.

My plan is to initially go through the whole of Gaiman's classes, take notes and read the course material. Then make a first draft of the game's prologue. Then go back and do the course again but this time doing the course work and applying it to my first draft.

I'm beginning to regret moving the Windows version of the game to UWP. Here's why:

• Every re-install, users must re-add the certificate. A 10-step process.
• It takes 12 minutes to build a package on the Azure pipeline.
• It takes about 10 minutes to build in Release on my machine.
• It takes an additional 8 seconds to build the XAML in Debug. Just annoying.
• Two crash bugs have occurred in Release that didn't occur in Debug.
• There's a crash bug that occurs in the packaged build but not in Debug or Release. (Fixed in version 0.5.1)
• The archived build is 177MB. Compared with 33MB for the other Windows build and 8MB for the Mac build.

What does a UWP build give me:

• Access to the user's location.
• Possible distribution on the Windows store in the future.

It's something Future-Me can make a decision on, but I'm thinking a third-party geo-location service might be the way to go.

So now I'm at the point where I can write the story. Just write!

I've started the prologue four times now. It's not easy and I'm feeling pretty demotivated. I've watched, and made notes on, Neil Gaiman's masterclass and it's only made the task more daunting. I've decided to make the task easier by not trying to make a social message. I have a feeling that what I write is probably going to be trite. That's OK. I'm writing this to understand storytelling and provide a background and setting for the game. I'm not writing a novel to change the world.

One of the versions of the prologue feels OK. It's written in first person and I'm going to write it in third person, compare and go ahead with whichever feels better. Rather than write the entire prologue and then do the masterclass coursework, I'm going to do a bit of each every day.

This Thursday morning I didn't get out of bed until after 10am, an indicator of how difficult I'm finding this. I wrote a bit more of the prologue and got a feeling for the characters so I'm feeling a bit more positive about it. Doing both the coursework and the prologue at the same time feels like the right thing to do.

I'm going to continue with the story for the next week but if progress is as slow as this week I'll need to have a re-think.