NickCummings.com

I’m starting to question whether or not I’m going to ever get this game-design thing off the ground. It’s almost paradoxical to me because I was making games — stupid, simple, crappy ones, of course, but still functional and fully-formed — almost fifteen years ago, but somewhere over the last decade I lost track of whatever it is that got me into a state where I was creating stuff and enjoying it. Maybe the technology changed too quickly, or maybe my brain stopped learning so readily. Either way, it’s been almost three months since I began devoting a huge chunk of my time to learning how to design games, and I still don’t have a single functioning thing to show for it.

Although I’m tempted to blame Flash and its byzantine structure, I think it’s ultimately my fault. I’m too easily beaten down by my own impatience and frustration. And even though I’ve poured countless hours into reading about game developers, rubbing elbows with them at conventions and (perhaps impolitely) sending them my awkward questions about their profession, I still don’t feel like I have the right stuff to do it myself.

Maybe I just need to keep looking for the right toolset, or the right idea, or the right state of mind, or the right situation. But at this point, I’m just so frustrated with being frustrated that I’m tempted to just give up for a while and focus on something else.

I’m not a web designer. Today was evidence enough of that. I spent almost an entire day trying to give my blog a quick once-over so I’d feel like writing more, and instead I just barely checked a couple small tasks off my list. I feel like I’m trying to write poetry with a washable marker.

The old WordPress theme is gone, and all the color and shape went along with it. I’m hoping to brush up enough on CSS to make this site feel more cozy, but considering that it took me seven (!) hours to throw that together, I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.

Actually, I am pretty happy with how the brand-new Connect page turned out. I borrowed a great icon set from thinkdesign and made a few additional icons within that framework.

I still plan on customizing the text sizes and color scheme throughout the site, reorganizing my portfolio and rewriting the “about” page. But right now I think I need to go for a run and drink a beer and just call it a day. I’m not cut out for layout work that doesn’t begin on paper and end in InDesign.

When you’re searching blindly for a purpose or direction in life, it’s probably natural to find your mind wandering into some pretty morbid places. I’m not saying I’m feeling depressed or that I’m contemplating the fringe benefits of kicking the bucket; I just think that, with all the time in the world to ponder life’s mysteries, it doesn’t take long before you’re left pondering the biggest of them all.

So it’s little wonder that I’ve taken such a liking to Mary Roach’s book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. (Amazon link)

It’s not just that the book provides such an unflinching and candid account of the many fascinating things that happen once you’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. What makes this book so special is how Roach treats her subject matter with such a delicate balance of awkward hilarity and genuine reverence. Dying is a serious, somber event, but what happens after the fact is  sometimes disgusting, sometimes uncanny, and almost always utterly fascinating.

Roach is the kind of writer I aspire to be. She’s got a sharp wit and an irrepressible curiosity that imbue this book with an oddly endearing personality. You’re probably going to feel an uncomfortable, unsettling feeling as you read her descriptions of cadavers being dissected, subjected to car and weapon safety tests and, yes, decomposing in the hot Tennessee sun, but Roach’s frank personality adds some much-needed levity to an unquestionably weighty subject.

It’s a strange kind of book to recommend, I know, but it’s also unlike just about anything else out there. And in my experience, reading a book with a dead person on the cover makes for some unusual conversations with strangers at coffee shops.

Now’s probably as good a time as any to look back on where I was two years ago this month. Much like it is on this beautiful June morning, the sun was shining, birds were chirping, and pollen was in full search-and-destroy mode, hell-bent on ruining my day. It didn’t, though, because I was graduating, dammit, and that’s all that mattered.

It wasn’t a clean break with the university like I’d hoped, thanks to a nasty incident involving my Honors College thesis and the last-minute set of expectations sprung upon me by a third party. I was looking at a summer mired in a painstaking, laborious rewrite of what I thought was a halfway-decent paper. Worse, I was moving back home for the first time in four years.

I’ve since moved out and back home a couple more times, so I’m getting used to the process of giving up the you-know-I-don’t-really-need-to-do-laundry-this-month joys of adulthood for the sake of being an amicable houseguest. But finding myself heading back to square one once again — moving apart from my girlfriend of a few years, without any promising job prospects or time-consuming life pursuits in mind — after two years of supposed self-improvement isn’t so great. It actually totally sucks.

But I promised myself I’d do it right this time. Being unemployed, I mean. And I think that, so far, I’ve done a bang-up job of going broke in style. I started running about a month ago with the help of a handy iPhone app called Couch to 5k (twitter.com/c25kapp), a $2.99 program that managed to accomplish the impossible feat of motivating me to exercise of my own volition. I’ve still got about half of the nine-week program to complete, but my weight’s the lowest it’s been in about eight years. Of course, it’s not getting me any closer to landing a job, but at least I feel like I’m accomplishing something.

I’ve been working on developing a system for getting stuff done, and I think I’m seeing some results. I’ve been trying out a program called Things (available on OS X and iOS only, unfortunately) that excels at intuitively categorizing and prioritizing tasks. It’s even helped me to launch a few personal projects that I hope will eventually see the light of day.

I’m also tackling David Foster Wallace’s immense novel, Infinite Jest, as part of the Infinite Summer challenge. It’s not too late to jump in! Check out an explanation and reading schedule at infinitesummer.org.

It’s not all good news, though. I’m still no closer to a fast-paced, jet-set life as a suave game designer, but I’m trying not to let that stress me out. I suppose I’m still young by most estimates; why worry?

I mean, besides the obvious.

Flash is so frustrating for me. It’s not that the program is especially difficult to learn or terribly designed, necessarily; I’m just irritated that I’m choosing the slow but steady path in teaching myself how to use it again after years without so much as dabbling in the software.

The last Flash project I made was completed in late 2006, so it’s been nearly four years since I touched the software. Things are fundamentally similar, even after Adobe bought out Macromedia and attempted to Adobe-ize the interface (largely a good thing), so the pace at which my beginner-level Lynda.com tutorials are moving is maddening. I’m trying to remind myself that if I just stick to it and take my time to really nail the fundamentals I’ll be better off in the long run, but that’s not how I’ve taught myself tools in the past. At a certain point, guided instruction is far less helpful than poking around for hours and figuring out things through trial and error. It’s how I got a feel for Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Final Cut Pro and Vegas. Even when I was 10 years old and first poking around in HyperCard on an old Macintosh, the books I read only got me so far — after a while I wanted to simply see how far my knowledge and imagination could take me.

I’m frustrated because my goal from the outset has been to start making games. The consensus from all sides of the games industry is that the only way to become great at making games is to just start making games and keep making them. There’s no introductory path or universal hierarchy of toolsets; all that matters is being able to make something that works and, ideally, can speak for itself why it was worth making.

So I’ll stick with the ten-minute explanations of how to use the shape tools to draw every sort of oval the mind can conjure up. I’ll try not to fall asleep. But fortunately, if I stick with my schedule I’ll be scripting within a week, and that’s when things get interesting.

So here’s the deal: I recently became unemployed after working six months as a legal assistant in the hopes of kindling a passion for legal work and, eventually, maybe even encouraging myself to apply to law school and make something of myself.

It dawned on me that that’s not the life I want for myself. For better or worse, I’m not happy unless I’m working in some creative fashion. I only feel good about myself when I’m staying up all night working on a layout, or writing about whatever comes to mind (hence this blog), or sketching ridiculous cartoons I wouldn’t dare share with anyone, or…you get the point.

I’m currently living in Eugene, Oregon, which doesn’t have a whole lot going on except for:

• An awesome library
• An abundance of affordable, healthy, local, organic food
• Plenty of bike paths
• A totally awesome girlfriend who’s got my back, even if she thinks I’m ridiculous

With that in mind, here’s the deal.

Starting tomorrow, I’m going to dive head-first back into Flash. With the help of Lynda.com (the best learning tool I’ve ever used outside of a classroom), I intend to teach myself everything I can about making games with Flash with the eventual goal of…well, it’s hard to say. I want to be a game designer, and dammit, now’s the time.

I’ve got this nagging worry in the back of my mind that this is just me trying to justify slacking off and being an unemployed layabout, but I’m pretty sure the opposite is true. For the first time ever, I have no obligations aside from feeding, sheltering and clothing myself. This is the time to hunker down and learn everything I can and start creating things to share with people. I have no idea where it’ll lead me, but frankly, I don’t care. For the next few months, my life is my own and this is what I’m choosing to do with it.

There’s one cardinal rule I love breaking as a writer, and that’s editing. Maybe it’s just the way I approach a first draft, but I get so energized just seeing where my prose takes me that to go back and revise it seems almost criminal at times. Clearly it’s a necessary process for producing something polished and presentable, but it’s hard to liberate yourself to write what you want when you’re just thinking ahead to the next step where you’re going to go back and eviscerate everything. It’s hard to focus on step one when all you can think about is step two.

The next few months are going to be all about step one. I’ll keep you posted on how that goes in a general sense, but if you’d like to keep up with all my notes, sketches, observations, and other game-related details, check out nickplaysgames.tumblr.com. And, of course, I’m still actively working on Silicon Sasquatch for the more high-brow gaming stuff — and if such a thing doesn’t exist, we’re doing our damnedest to make it real!

You might remember that I attempted and subsequently failed to complete National Novel Writing Month in November of 2009. That’s all right; whatever; I’ve moved on.

But now it’s April, and April means Script Frenzy month! The premise is similar to NaNoWriMo, but instead of being tasked with churning out a 50,000 word novel, writers are instead given 30 days to write a 100-page script.

This is great for people like me because

• Scripts have these huge margins. Have you seen them? It’s just ridiculous.
• You don’t have to deal with all those irritating trappings of novel writing, such as description and flowery language
• 100 pages is, like, a lot less than 250 pages

Want to sign up? Great! You can keep me company and watch first-hand as I fall flat on my face at around page seven.

First, you’ll wanna head over to scriptfrenzy.org and sign up for a free account. If you participated in NaNoWriMo before, your old account information (and all those shameful memories of failure) are preserved and adapted to work with Script Frenzy.

Next, you’ll want to brush up on script formatting guidelines. Don’t let these overwhelm you; they’re there to help give you a head start on the structure of your writing so you can focus on getting that Star Wars/Harry Potter crossover you’ve been having those creepy dreams about nailed down on paper.

And last, you’ll want to add me as a writing buddy. I don’t know if that serves any overt purpose, but hey: strength in numbers, right?

One final note: You can write whatever kind of script you’ve been yearning for. Got an excellent idea for the next soul-wrenching, low-budget indie movie? Eager to plan out that comic book series starring an unemployed writer with a bachelor’s degree in English or journalism? Think you’ve got what it takes to bring a revival of Remington Steele to television? Those are all perfectly acceptable reasons to take up the Script Frenzy gauntlet. (Actually, it might be best if we just leave Remington Steele alone.) Hell, I’m just writing a videogame script — something that has no established format — and even that’s okay.

So if you’re interested, take a look and let me know if you get on board. Besides, April’s just as crappy as November, weather-wise; what better time to flex your latent creativity muscles and get something done?

One of the best perks about living in the Pacific Northwest is that you probably won’t be murdered by Mother Nature. Floods? Unlikely. Tornados? Almost never. Volcanoes erupting? Well, okay, sometimes. But when you consider that your offspring are probably not going to be eaten by a roving pack of hyenas in the wilds of Oregon or Washington, you start to appreciate just how relatively demure this ecosystem is.

Until you start reading about the Cascadia fault, anyway. It’s a major fault line that runs from Northern California to Vancouver, B.C. along the Pacific Ocean coastline, and every few hundred years it decides to lurch forward and basically ruin everything.

And honestly, “fault” is quite an apologetic word for a massive subduction range that fires off a high-magnitude quake capable of leveling cities. I thought “Massive Catastrophic Pain Generator” might be a better fit, but so far the USGS hasn’t budged.

So what does it mean? According to a New York Times article by Peter Yanev, an earthquake engineering expert, it means we’re in for a more devastating quake than what occurred in Chile or Haiti — and generally speaking, we’re not at all prepared. Apparently if massive earthquakes are a rare occurrence in a particular region — as they are in the Northwest — that area is deemed a lower-risk zone. Earthquake proofing standards are kept lower and are perhaps less rigidly enforced than in a region like California’s San Andreas fault, which puzzlingly has a lower threshold for destruction than our humble Cascadia fault.

This isn’t going to surprise most people in the Northwest, though. Most of us have known about the impending earthquake for years and are fully aware that it could level buildings and kill and injure lots of people. So why aren’t we worried about it? Why am I not worried about it? I guess when there’s something so potentially devastating looming in the unforeseeable future, the most common human instinct is to ignore it. It’s not surprising; after all, how many people avoid the doctor because they’re afraid something is wrong with them?

Arguably the worst part is that we have practically no idea when the next quake will happen. We’re due for another one already, but it could be as much as 100 years away. So while we may not see it in our lifetimes, the next generation most definitely will.

But it’s kind of exciting in a perverse way, isn’t it? I mean, I’m not advocating widespread injuries and destruction, but we’re talking about a high-stakes disaster waiting to happen. And at the very least, we’ve finally got incontrovertible proof that those of us who live in the Pacific Northwest are totally bad dudes.

The other night I dreamed I was trapped at a lawyer party.

This party — apparently like all other lawyer parties — took place at SeaWorld. I was surrounded by lawyers laughing, talking to each other, playing with their kids, and just generally having a great time. But none of them would acknowledge my existence.

I remember I was just trying to make my way down and out the doors so I could get on with my life, but nobody would give me directions or even give any sign that they knew I was there.

I thought it was just a bizarre dream, but I mentioned it to Melissa and she said “So you were trapped with lawyers and they were keeping you from getting from point A to point B?”

I hadn’t thought about it like that.

Anyway, it’s time to go to work. Maybe if I’m lucky a whale will eat me.