Creative Project Thoughts 2/26/2024

Song in Mind: Stickerbrush Symphony, Donkey Kong Country 2- SNES

Finally everyone in the family is asleep and I can share some of my thoughts on the projects I’m currently creating. I put time into my creative projects usually at night when my kids are asleep. I have time to focus without being distracted, or needing to respond to someone who needs my help. And to be frank, some days I don’t even want to put time into these projects as by the time I have finished what I need to do around the house, I’m exhausted, so I just want to go to sleep. I bet a lot of parents and people can relate to that.

Like many creatives, I feel the need to put my fingers in multiple pies. I like to write, but I also like to video edit and draw. And because of this at the moment I am writing my young adult novel, Ghost Boyd, while also making a video for my youtube channel titled “Smells like: Dragon Quest 8”. 

If you’ve read my projects page you know that the novel Ghost Boyd is the script for the videogame it will be used for. You see, I had the game in mind before the book. But I decided to make a book because I thought it would be good to get the story correct first before making all the game assets. I could also have two products based on each other instead of just one.  I could imagine myself making a lot of pixel art or 3D models and not using them. I understand there are always going to be assets on the cutting room floor, I just want to minimize the amount of it. 

About the novel, I’ve been wanting to push the narrative a bit. Right now I have listed all the dungeons or places that will be the main quest of the story, but I’m trying to add snippets of story in between them to make it more cohesive. From the beginning I knew if I made a novel first, it would not suffice to just be a description of gameplay and dungeons, it needed to be an actual story one would follow. And though the game itself will be based on the book, I’m doing my best to make sure the book, and the game, will have strengths pertaining to the medium in which it will be created. 

I’ve gotten the narrative with a couple of the dungeons, but I’m not even done with half of them. I know what they are, but I’m finding I need more companions the hero meets, and more villains or adversaries that block his way. Each one of these needs to have some backstory and reasons for existing. And then I also need to intertwine them throughout the narrative in a way that makes sense and is interesting, basically writing a good book. 

But like I’ve said, I’m also putting my creative energy into making a video. 

I like to play videogames, I find the medium so creative, literally almost every creative process is rolled into a video game. Music, story, gameplay, artistic vision when it comes to visuals, it's all there. I’m a fan of gaming youtubers, and I’ve wanted to make a good gaming channel myself for some time now. I have a couple uploads, but by watching others I realize I need to edit differently, better even. So I’m making a youtube series entitled “Smells Like: (whatever the game is)”. It's basically a series trying to pinpoint what makes certain games what they are, and entertainingly talk about them. Looking back on youtubers in the early 2000’s, I think it was so amazing that people could actually record gameplay from the games they were playing. At the time I had a gateway windows 98 computer, which with more ram, became a windows XP machine. I had no idea how to capture gameplay footage. But now as an adult, I have a Steamdeck which can basically record everything I’m playing and stream it at the same time! I now record what I’m playing so, these smell-like videos are basically me talking about what I’m playing. I want to get my thoughts about them out, so I thought this would be a good way to do that. I want to get better at editing and making videos entertaining to watch, so look out for that video on my youtube channel. 

I try to work on the novel and the video everyday but sometimes I can only do one or the other, stay tuned for more updates and let me know if you have anything else you would like me to write about.

Sincerely,

Kurt Jensen