So with so much to cover, I think I’ll just summarize/generalize. There are a couple of things that stuck out to me reading Schell. 

Chapter six confirmed a suspicion of mine about the newness and freshness of games, and their potential. Schell said games can absorb all other media into itself. Which is pretty incredible when you say it aloud. For some reason I wrote very rude side notes when she said experience trumps artistic expression, but it makes perfect sense. And to be clear she’s likely referring to the experience of playing the game, rather than a long career as developer. I liked her points on theme, especially where she stated it’s just whatever the game’s about. She has a very grounded look on games, and seems to state things blankly, as a matter of fact, which is also how I tend to speak and write.

I liked her juggler example in Chapter 7. Basically where the juggler does unique kinds of “juggles,” that really epitomizes the work less, think harder mentality. I appreciated her emphasis on sleep (I could always use some with the neighbors I have), but especially how God speaks through dreams.” Truthfully I’m pretty far away from religion, but what she means here is your subconscious knows what it wants, and it knows what is fun/feels good. Our conscious brain needs to make an effort to connect to it, and bring those sortive primordial ideas (which I call inspiration), into the fold. One example was after a night of fun with a guy, I had a strange dream I was one an island (y’all better not steal this btw), where I saw these incredibly strange deer with these sortive’  messy brown coat and tan stripes, with enormous tall antlers sharpened to a razor point. I called them “Spearheads.” And made up some lore about how they sharpen their antlers on rocks to impale or disembowel predators or unlunkly humans. They live in a fantasy world of my design that is years in the making at this point. I would have loved to make it into a game, but will have to wait until my skills catch up with the genius. 

I loved this so much because I see inspiration as superior quality. And you get superior quality with time and patience. Games are media, and media is art. It doesn’t mean you must make an ultra-realistic, uber-serious game about the human condition. I think true art speaks much quieter than that, it reaches deeper, it talks about intrinsic things, things we all understand. It simply comes out from what I imagine to be this sortive’ ancient, sortive’ primordial font of life or brilliance.

More things from chapter 7: Sketching it out definitely helped Professor, and Schell definitely agrees on this (even if you can’t draw), which ai can’t. Talking to yourself is not a sign of being crazy and Schell encourages it, so you can understand your ideas. Speaking of also read her chapters aloud and write notes, which is why it takes me forever to make this dev log. Don’t whine about stuff you don’t have, you have work to do was the gist, but also don’t worry about wasting material. She says use what you have, be clever, be resourceful. 

Oh an avoid people to try to poke plot holes in your narrative. Those people typically aren’t very helpful. I wrote Tim as a side note for that, who’s my older brother. And he does love to do that. 

Chapter 8 was much more painful for me.

She says to not get attached to your ideas, they’re like paper cups -expendable. She also stresses to disassociate from the fear that comes with what she says about ideas which ai thought was funny. Oh and she also says to “forget quality.” Which made my brother laugh when I told him about it. But unlike that conversation I have a chance to explain. Polish can gloss over and indeed mask glaring issues with a game, it’s important to know what the bones are and what’s flesh and muscle. Knowing if your game and indeed its systems are preem throughout. 

Another cool piece of advice Schell had  was to imagine your game as if only 50% were complete, would it still be playable? Short answer it it better be. She talked about soemthing else called “sprints” and AVID, which seemed a little to corporate for my taste, with the wonderful introduction of these robotic passion checks. But whatever who am I to judge, when the word has existed before me and many a man woman and child have apparently done these all to routine sprints. And and speaking of I don’t see it in my notes about what I remember her saying was something along the lines of “games are never finished, there’re simply abandoned.” There’s y’know, bits of content here and there that were supposed to be more, but in actuality they never were. They’re exactly that, vestigial remnant of abandoned things. You simply  reach a deadline and and that’s that.

Chapter 9 is audience and was the super long one if I remember right. Makes since, that’s who’s supposed to buy all my crap so this is probly a good point to drop off for now.