Necromancer Development Diary 4 - Creative Insecurity

A strange thing happened to me today, I was reminded that I can sometimes still be insecure about my creative output.

Okay that isn’t so special, I am only human, I just like to pretend that I’m shameless and don’t care what other people think- what was special was that I was insecure about my creativity without realizing it. I like to think I am pretty self-aware when it comes to these things, so it surprises me when a patch of weakness goes by unnoticed to me.

I like to think of myself as a Nintendo end of level boss- all my weak 
spots are brightly coloured and easily visible.

  Specifically I have been posting my story concept for the game around various forums and places for feedback on the strength of the concept, narrative, story arc and so on. This gave me the impression that I was being very outgoing and forward with my work. After all, of all the skills I am trying to teach myself in this project, writing and storytelling is an existing skill I have, I have been trained in it and take a lot of pride in it. It was not until today that I realized I was leaning on that confidence in my writing, to avoid sharing more concrete content of my game concept (and exposing my still early abilities in other skills). A few typical forum interactions would go something like this- Me: “Here’s my story concept, let me know what you think!” Community: “I guess it looks okay, from what we can see, but it really makes no sense without more evidence of what the game itself will look like and how it will play.”

So of course the community is correct, I was trying to get feedback on my story concept in a vacuum, because that is where my confidence is, and I was putting off showing what my overall game concept could be, even though it has been solidified in my head for some time. In that spirit I have heavily updated the several pages of my website under the Gameplay heading to show insanely early concepts of what the various game screens could look like, with some description of how they will function.

It's not much, but it's mine. 

I have to say, it feels good to put it out there in the public sphere for feedback, and I am proud of the art work no matter how amateur, because it is better than I could have done a month ago, and way better than I could have done a year ago, and that should be all that matters to me. I should be better at following my own advice about sharing creativity no matter what level of talent you have, because that is how one improves and how one gets advice and help.

And now I can go back to claiming I know everything. (Courtesy of Cyanide & Happiness)