Text isn't sacred
Hi pal!
On Saturday I went to Sorbonne University in Paris and showcased Surmount together with my incredibly supportive partner Héloïse (who’s currently updating her website). We barely caught a break between play sessions, starting 10:00 and ending 19:00. According to a friend, apparently people kept talking about the game once they left the booth too which is a good sign.
This is probably the fourth time we showcase the game at a public event, each time the feedback has become way less about frustrations and way more about laughs and smiles. It’s shaping up!
We’re still looking for more play testers, especially people who are willing to record themselves play or are willing to get on a call and share their screen. We’re trying to find where the friction points are and what might be missing. Let me know if you are interested or if you know someone who might be!
On to this week’s writing…
Text isn’t sacred
Whenever I find something online that I want to read, but don’t have time to read right away, I save it to my “read later” list in my web browser. Last night I was trying to pick something from this list. My partner was watching me as I was flicking back and forth, up and down on my screen. I told her I probably only want to read about 10% of these things. When it comes to web-based reading I collect articles and essays more than I read them, might be because they’re free and I barely value them compared to a book. Or because some of them are on subjects I know I would benefit from reading, such as game development topics and other thought-worthy stuff related to what I do.
I want to complete my reading list some day. To reach the end of it and feel like I’m a productive reader. That version of myself would be so much smarter than I am right now. Instead I just keep finding more and more save-for-later-worthy reading material. But the list of ends up feeling like homework, and that feeling only gets worse the longer something stays on the list. When I actually sit down with my iPad to read, I just want be delighted and interested by something short. It’s difficult to continue reading a long article from somewhere in the middle.
The length shouldn’t matter though, if I don’t finish an article it probably just means that it didn’t grab me enough. I’ve finished reading plenty of books so I’m not incapable of reading long things. Might just be that some of these articles aren’t interesting enough for me. It could also be that a printed book goes through a lot more editing and questioning before it ends up being printed.
Now that I think about it, it’s a bit sacred for me to start reading anything. I ponder “is this the right time? Is this the right mood?” If anything is off I procrastinate starting it. I do this with books, blog posts and even games and movies. It’s ridiculous. I could be way more reckless about reading and giving up on stuff.
Next time that I sit down to read I’ll just try to open something without weighing the options too much, read without being too precious about what’s in front of me and see what happens. If I find it difficult to care about it I will just quit. Do something else. There’s plenty more to find. Nothing is sacred until it has proven itself to be sacred.
It’s okay if not an entire text is interesting, a few golden nuggets can be enough.
Mini Notes
Here’s a bit of text that kept my interest lately.
📝 Article - Artists have forgotten how to draw
For all my life I’ve believed that you don’t need to be able to draw a realistic human hand to be able to achieve things with your art. You can express a whole lot with very little. It might even be procrastination from real soul-searching to dive to deep into mastering drawing. I might be thinking this way because I grew up on comics and cartoons that look far from realistic, although admittedly drawing good cartoons requires some understanding of how things look in reality. I guess that’s easy to forget.
📝 Article - Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?
So much of what I’ve done online is about trying to be interesting. But I rarely try to be interested. I want to try even harder to write with curiosity and wonder and be less worried about wether I come across as interesting. Now that I said that out loud though, it sounds like it might be too much of the other extreme. I shouldn’t stop self editing.
📝 Article - Van Gogh’s advice to a young artist
Living life is the education of an artist.
Thank you for reading! Have a creative week.
(I wanna come up with a better outro one of these days…)
Cool to read about the reactions to the game - that must be meaningful to hear and witness.