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studiomcah
Community for science fiction and fantasy author/artist M.C.A. Hogarth.
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22 hours ago
Gamedev Diary: Talking Yourself Into Tasks
One of the most underrated productivity hacks on my list of things that work is “fool yourself into doing it.” This is a skill I developed because I’m not very brave, and yet most of life requires courage. I survive this by telling myself I’m not actually going to do scary things while planning to do them.
For instance: I dislike travel. Every trip I’ve ever embarked on successfully has involved me telling myself I’m not actually going to follow through on it. “I’m just shopping for ticket prices, I’m not going to buy them.” “I can cancel these at any time, but I’m just looking at hotels in the area.” “I can always sell this hotel room to some con-goer who needs it, there’s no need to panic.” “I’m packing, but I can always back out. I’ll be out the money, but that’s fine!” “I am in the boarding tube, but I can always turn back and run a—okay, now it’s too late, might as well keep going.”
Once something’s fait accompli, I can relax and deal with it.
You can do this with many kinds of projects that look terrifying when you scope them properly. “A novel is how many pages? I have to write how much?” “No, no, just a sentence. Today you’re just opening the document. See? Not bad. You could write a sentence and call it a day. Maybe two. Okay a paragraph maybe, might as well.” And you just keep doing that: “My job is to open the document and write a line or two, every day.” And eventually, you end up with a book.
It’s been a while since I tackled a new project, something I had no way to get my arms around. The idea of writing a game was terrifying, so… naturally… I told myself I wasn’t going to write a game. One person, writing an entire game? I knew Stardew Valley took ConcernedApe like 8 years. I didn’t want to spend 8 dedicated years on something.
But I did want to write a game.
So I deployed the chaff. “I’m not going to write a game,” I said. “I’m going to write a silly toy that generates a baby Jokkad from two parents and tells me their colors.”
This was my thought: “If I make this toy and it’s pretty, when I’m bored and need a pick-me-up, I can just generate a random baby and look at it and be amused, and then I can go back to work.”
So that’s all I concentrated on. “My goal is to make a single web page that lets you select two parents, then generates a baby that looks a little like them. I’ll be able to use it to generate random Jokka for my stories! That would be useful.”
The other step of this “fool yourself into doing it” productivity hack is to tell people about it. I know there are two lines of thoughts about this: “If you tell people, you’ll drain your enthusiasm and raise their expectations, and that will sabotage you before you get going,” and “if you tell people, you’ll create accountability and it’ll keep you honest and drive you on.”
As usual, I find this dichotomous framing less than useful. It’s obvious to me that some projects benefit from total secrecy for various reasons… while others need accountability. And there’s a third path there, which is “other people’s enthusiasm makes me enthusiastic.” When I’m working on something I adore, external stimuli matters less to me. But on things where I’m actively embarking on a project I’m not sure I can swing at all, the “borrow other people’s enthusiasm to remind yourself you can do this” third path is vital to longevity. For me, anyway.
The reason I have any of these screenshots at all (and I have so many of them) is because I shared often, incrementally, and self-deprecatingly as I experimented and iterated. “Lol, look at this hot mess.” Or, “Eee, it’s working!” All of it kept me going when I wasn’t sure I was capable of what I was undertaking.
For a long time, I told myself I was “learning,” or “experimenting,” or “making a toy” while working on JOKKA! Making it any more serious would have hamstrung me when I needed the momentum. Especially because so many of the things I was doing, I didn’t understand and wasn’t sure would be possible to me, with my limited understanding of all the tools that coders use to accomplish things. But I tried to keep a sense of wonder about it, and my most common question was, “Wouldn’t it be cool if…?”
“Wouldn’t it be cool if babies inherited colors across generations? So maybe we could remember the grandparents and sometimes surface their traits?”
“Wouldn’t it be cool if it also inherited… I don’t know. Stats? Or predilections toward them?”
“Sometimes, a kid’s born that is nothing like their family. Wouldn’t it be cool if there awas a mutation rate? And you couldn’t always predict exactly what you’d get?”
“Wouldn’t it be cool if there wasn’t a constrained palette, but instead you’d get blends of possible millions of hex colors?”
“I’m just drawing this baby image. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could fill in the colors with the inherited colors?”
“WOULDN’T IT BE COOL IF THIS WORKED?”
And eventually, I realized: “Wait, it can. And it is.
…What next?”
What next, then, is a backtrack, in which we talk about how I decided what to make a game about! Tune in next week for that!
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Cursive Practice Video, to Relax
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
- Pen: Moonman Starry Glass dip pen, Mars: https://www.jetpens.com/Moonman-Starry-Sky-Glass-Dip-Pen-Mars/pd/31536
- Paper: Strathmore Writing Series 500, lined: https://www.jetpens.com/Strathmore-500-Series-Writing-Pad-8.5-x-11-Lined-50-Sheets/pd/15322
- Ink: Robert Oster, Rose Gilt Tynte: https://www.jetpens.com/Robert-Oster-Rose-Gilt-Tynte-Fountain-Pen-Ink-Shake-N-Shimmy-50-ml-Bottle/pd/25170
00:04:27
Overview of the First Oil Paint Experiment
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
00:03:35
Alysha Misc
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
The Jaguar's Heart 7: We Are Not a Monolith
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
The Jaguar's Heart 6: Hatespeech
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
Gamedev Diary: Why a Game?
It’s wild to me to realize that my generation was the first generation to grow up with computer games. I had to remind myself that when I was very young, there were no home computers and no consoles and no arcade games, and then, in my lifetime, that became a thing. I lived through that? I lived through that. And then I lived through the era before online multiplayer games and the internet and internet-enabled games!
Can you imagine a world without games? I can’t, and I was born and gamboled through a large part of my childhood without them. Without even the conception of them. Board games, sure. Card games, yes. Social games like bingo and charades… but nothing involving a screen.
So I grew up with the computer gaming industry. I played the first text adventure games, like Zork; me and my friends played on the first consoles, the Atari and the Intellivision, at one another’s houses; my family gathered around the Apple IIe to watch my father navigate the eerie green line art map of the first ...
Gamedev Diary: Hobbies Evolving
My work schedule with the game goes something like “fix bugs; ship something players have asked for; ship something I want.”
Usually, the things I want feel random, but they’re almost always in service to making the game feel more convincing as a simulation.
This week, in addition to a bunch of features and bug fixes, I made characters able to evolve their interests as they go through life. The first version of the Interest System picked some hobbies for characters when they reached adulthood, based on their aptitudes (or just random chance)… so maybe your Jokkad, on maturation, is now interested in making candy and collecting pebbles, or collecting riddles, or planning caravan schedules (some people’s interests are more practical than others!).
But I love modeling behavior, and it was always my plan for interests to evolve over time.
I put Phase 2 of this feature in this week, and now adults sometimes get bored of stuff they were interested in and develop new interests, particularly...
Tales From Ke Bakil: Childhood Friends
I used to do a lot more random chatter about stuff I was working on, and I thought, ‘you know, that was fun, let’s do that again.’ So today I want to tell you I put a feature in the game and now it’s already given me too many feels.
The game lets you choose a heart-friend for any character (the onu relationship that we see, most obviously, in Pearl in the Void between Keshul and Dekashin). But it “creates” new friendships organically for your characters without your consultation based on their personalities and jobs and interests. These are called ‘drift-friends’, and if those characters stick around in your clan long enough, they’ll hang out together and go from being acquaintances to best friends.
Good enough. But then I thought, ‘but what about childhood friends!’ So I put in something that allowed characters who are youths together at the same time to have a chance to become childhood friends. These friendships form with messages that persist so you can look back ...
The Jaguar Reads an AI-Written Book
Over the weekend, I read a book that I’m 95% sure was AI-written. I’ve listened to people talk about how it’s done: you brainstorm characters and a plot with AI, prompt it for an outline, adjust the outline, prompt it to create character and setting guides… attach all that to your project, then tell it to write the first chapter. You adjust the chapter, add it to the project, then tell it to write the second, etc, until you get to the end. Then you tidy the whole thing and publish. The "rapid release" people either love this (because you can release a book in a day or two and do it again immediately) or hate it (because they can't keep up with people using this strategy with unaugmented human brains). But it's clearly a thing that's happening, and few people who do it are admitting it.
Reasons I thought this book was AI:
Every chapter ends with a weird wrap-up style: “Main Character had accomplished XY and Z. Tomorrow, he’d have to tackle AB and C. But for today: job well done.” And I do mean every chapter. At first I thought ‘maybe the author’s serializing this and needs to remind readers about what just happened” but when it’s doing overviews of what happens in the chapter at the end, it’s weird.
All the places give you a “movie set” feeling of being wooden facades. Like… ‘there’s a baker. He makes bread.’ Nothing else. Only bread is mentioned. Not even the kind of bread. There’s a weird lack of specificity to everything. The baker always has a ‘basket of bread’. Or occasionally, a basket of pastries. (No word on what kind.) Likewise, there is a blacksmith. We know he can make hammers, because the apprentice made one. But that’s it. No idea what else the blacksmith does for the town.
Then there’s suddenly spates of specificity. “I have these exotic spices that sound like a list generated for game inventory.” These specific things are never mentioned again.
The technobabble sounds like stuff Claude gives me as placeholders. “Mana structure efficiency at 45%. Suboptimal but holding.”
Similarly there are some odd verbal tics that repeat throughout the text, and they are suspiciously clever ones, like analogies that rely on an abstract and a concrete noun: “It tasted of cinnamon and regret.” “The tavern smelled of old ale and worry.” Even the title uses this phrasing. Authors can have verbal tics, of course, but I associate a lot of these with AI.
The supporting characters do the exact same things, as if they’re programmed NPCs. Celebrating an achievement? ‘We go to this exact same tavern, every time.’ Checking up on the main character? “You need food and rest.” (I can’t count the number of times this character suggested everyone have food and rest, in exactly those words. No variation.)
This one is hard to describe, but the characters have believable backstories that suggest depth, but these backstories do not inform how they interact with other characters. The nemesis becomes the protagonist’s friend based on a single interaction, and this backstory, while mentioned in subsequent chapters, causes no friction, for instance. It’s as if every character was created in isolation and the author can’t figure out how to make them combine.
Could this all be the work of an inexperienced author? Sure. But that tells me that we have trained AI to work off story templates that inexperienced authors also rely on. If you have decades of “write to market” advice that treat books as widgets with “story beats” and “character arcs” that can be abstracted into formulas, you shouldn’t be surprised when books start to sound alike. They already were, prior to AI, it’s just that AI makes creating them faster.
Did people like the AI-generated book? Well, it has over a hundred reviews and a 4.5 star average rating, and even on Goodreads, it's doing well, so the answer is: “Yes, it’s good enough.” Did the author confess to AI-writing it? No. Maybe he didn’t! But my guess is that he did.
Do I care about this? Not really. I didn’t enjoy reading it because it gave me the same feeling social media scrolling does, that I’ve eaten empty calorie food that’s programming my brain to repeat basic and uncreative patterns. But humans have always riffed off bad things to make better things and I can totally see someone using AI to generate a draft like this, and then completely overhauling it into something enjoyable.
I don’t write like this because I’m weird. I am constitutionally incapable of the ‘write to market’ formulaic approach (which is why I’m not on a yacht sailing to my property on the Riviera). Even my attempts at romance and litrpg novels veer off into directions that make them too odd (yes, I managed to make both these genres unprofitable). But I’m one of those capital-A artists that indies like to sneer at, and I’m happy that way. I can’t even do that right: I’m an Arteeste who doesn’t care if you’re using AI!
My audience was always going to be the weirdos who want to learn my conlangs and vanish into alien cultures so completely they leave no traces. That's you all! You're awesome.
But yeah, AI-written books. You might have already read one and not realized it. The name of this one, if you want to check it out, is below, and yes I paywalled it because I don't want to bother with drama.
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Friday Update: Me, My Robot Army, and Long Career Thoughts
Red Honey has wrapped up! I’m not sure what I’m going to serialize next, but I figured I’d take a breather for the rest of the year since there’s so little of it left. We’ll continue to have Back-in-Time Tuesdays every week, but Fridays will be a hodgepodge of whatever’s on my mind. And what’s on my mind today is the Jokka game, which my Discord crowd has convinced me to just call JOKKA! (I think with exclamation point. With exclamation point, right, you all?)
I think I last seriously wrote about this around my birthday so it’s been almost two months. A lot happens in two months when you’re directing AI to code for you.
The foremost thing I’ve learned is that I am perfectly positioned to take advantage of AI for coding, because I have these things going for me:
I used to write technical documentation for software
I can do project management
I can draw
I can write and have written many novels' worth of material for background
I have done some light coding work
I like gaming and have played many games mindfully, noting what I hate and what I enjoy
But the number one thing that makes this easy for me is:
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