Post by Nola on Jun 20, 2019 20:25:41 GMT
Hey everybody,
As you've hopefully heard by now, we're gonna be taking a lengthy summer break this year. After the Tempest mission on Saturday, June 29th (barring a potential Zorya make-up mission on July 1st), we'll be off until the Zorya mission on Monday, September 2nd.
(The rest of this post is even more optional than the first bit.)
Apart from giving everybody plenty of time for some of that summer vacationing they warned us about in seminary school, this'll also give me time to recharge and think about how the game is run.
It may or may not be news to you that I want to be a professional writer/storyteller. Aside from being my chief coping mechanism, it's absolutely my passion and often the only thing I can admit to myself I'm any good at. Suffice to say, for the past couple years, STAB has been my primary creative outlet for storytelling.
This has been both good and bad! This is the first thing I've ever been able to consistently work on, which is good for my confidence, though that goes away when I’m not able to keep up the output I want. It’s helped make me more comfortable with the idea of being in charge of something, but that brings its own pressures, which sit atop the main problem:
My standards are too damn high. I can count on maybe two hands the pieces of writing I’ve done for any version of this game that I’ve really been satisfied with. Running missions tends to be a constant low-grade panic attack for me because I’m so narrowly focused on whether it’s ‘good,’ and then when I don’t instantly get people telling me how great everything I do is (which is an irrational expectation), I tell myself that I’m a failure.
This, of course, is just my various mental illnesses at play, and not any kind of flaw in the player base. I am not conditioned to like anything I create, or to feel any sense of pride or competence. Any time I do something that might make me stand out, I feel unsafe, which is really inconvenient with this sense of ambition I’ve developed over the last five years or so.
As far as STAB goes, I think the problem is that I focus far too much on whether something’s ‘good,’ and not nearly enough on whether it’s ‘fun.’ I realize that if people weren’t having some modicum of fun, they wouldn’t keep playing, but I can’t help but feel like having more emphasis on enjoyability, and less emphasis on a highly complicated narrative, would improve things drastically for most, if not all, involved.
I don't immediately know what this will look like going forward. My plan is to take the first couple weeks off entirely, and then I'll start to both put some ideas together myself and solicit some from you guys, because the one thing I know for sure is that I want this to be more of a community-driven game, so that momentum is not dependent on any one person’s creative output.
So, enjoy the break, get some logs in if you feel like it, and stay tuned for some event announcements and that sort of thing. Thank you all for playing, as always, and thanks to those of you who read all this, as well. Feel free to leave whatever feedback you’d like either here or on Discord or in a PM.
Happy summer, everybody!
CJ
As you've hopefully heard by now, we're gonna be taking a lengthy summer break this year. After the Tempest mission on Saturday, June 29th (barring a potential Zorya make-up mission on July 1st), we'll be off until the Zorya mission on Monday, September 2nd.
(The rest of this post is even more optional than the first bit.)
Apart from giving everybody plenty of time for some of that summer vacationing they warned us about in seminary school, this'll also give me time to recharge and think about how the game is run.
It may or may not be news to you that I want to be a professional writer/storyteller. Aside from being my chief coping mechanism, it's absolutely my passion and often the only thing I can admit to myself I'm any good at. Suffice to say, for the past couple years, STAB has been my primary creative outlet for storytelling.
This has been both good and bad! This is the first thing I've ever been able to consistently work on, which is good for my confidence, though that goes away when I’m not able to keep up the output I want. It’s helped make me more comfortable with the idea of being in charge of something, but that brings its own pressures, which sit atop the main problem:
My standards are too damn high. I can count on maybe two hands the pieces of writing I’ve done for any version of this game that I’ve really been satisfied with. Running missions tends to be a constant low-grade panic attack for me because I’m so narrowly focused on whether it’s ‘good,’ and then when I don’t instantly get people telling me how great everything I do is (which is an irrational expectation), I tell myself that I’m a failure.
This, of course, is just my various mental illnesses at play, and not any kind of flaw in the player base. I am not conditioned to like anything I create, or to feel any sense of pride or competence. Any time I do something that might make me stand out, I feel unsafe, which is really inconvenient with this sense of ambition I’ve developed over the last five years or so.
As far as STAB goes, I think the problem is that I focus far too much on whether something’s ‘good,’ and not nearly enough on whether it’s ‘fun.’ I realize that if people weren’t having some modicum of fun, they wouldn’t keep playing, but I can’t help but feel like having more emphasis on enjoyability, and less emphasis on a highly complicated narrative, would improve things drastically for most, if not all, involved.
I don't immediately know what this will look like going forward. My plan is to take the first couple weeks off entirely, and then I'll start to both put some ideas together myself and solicit some from you guys, because the one thing I know for sure is that I want this to be more of a community-driven game, so that momentum is not dependent on any one person’s creative output.
So, enjoy the break, get some logs in if you feel like it, and stay tuned for some event announcements and that sort of thing. Thank you all for playing, as always, and thanks to those of you who read all this, as well. Feel free to leave whatever feedback you’d like either here or on Discord or in a PM.
Happy summer, everybody!
CJ