I’ve spent the last month, plus a week or so more, working on this illustration. This was not the original plan. I had, at first, wanted to have this done in perhaps a few days. Then, when I realized the scope was a bit wider than I’d thought, maybe a week or two. In the end, it took a bit more than a month – or more than a bit more, close to a month and a half. In a certain sense, this is exactly the sort of thing I wanted to spend my time on – the sort of work that is part of the greater whole of the game, but is also a piece of art which I can be proud of in its own right. That’s the dream!
Well, yes and no. I am pleased with how this turned out, and I don’t really regret the time I spent on it – but I do think that focusing on just getting this one thing done turned into an unnecessary (and unnecessarily frustrating) bottleneck. This was a great opportunity to observe a dynamic which has prevented me from making nearly as much progress as I would like on my projects over the last few years: I pick out a task that needs to be done, and some aspect of that task is difficult to figure out how to approach. The first days are largely spent just thinking about it, and with all this thinking the scope of the task just starts seeming bigger and bigger until it’s even more overwhelming. Eventually I decide I have to start working on it, and I pick away around the edges – but it’s so much, so big and complicated with so many pieces I have to keep track of, that I tend to go very slowly, only working maybe an hour a day on it if I can even manage that, and the combination of the size of the task and the lack of focused effort makes progress seem even slower and more discouraging.
Even as I break the project down into smaller components to make it possible to approach without dying of anxiety, sometimes those components need to be broken down into components. With this particular illustration, there was far more necessary detail than I’m used to doing in my art: I don’t draw a lot of buildings, especially complex buildings, and genius that I am I decided that what this already very complex building needed was to have a wing full of broken birdcages, probably one of the most intricate details I could have chosen to add. Also, how do you even handle shading on cages in this art style? The lines are so thick relative to the detail that just modifying the color won’t make any visible change!
Well, as you can see by looking at the finished picture, I figured that out (note: I wrote these words before I figured that out, so hopefully the preceding sentence is correct). By themselves, decisions like these are no big deal – we make tiny creative and logistical choices all the time, and the burden isn’t usually too strenuous. Where it gets tough for me, though, is when I have a lot of interconnected choices to make, or problems to figure out, that all need to be addressed before I can meaningfully move on. That’s what made this illustration so difficult.
However, the blockage isn’t just about the difficulty of the task, but my tendency to fixate on just one tricky task and then get frustrated when it doesn’t go well. There’s no way to completely get around this simply being a complex and challenging piece of art to create – but that doesn’t innately mean that it had to grind production to a halt. There’s still some programming tasks I could do, lots of animation, some game design and music writing – lots of other important jobs I could have tackled to work off steam while I continued to work on this. I think the main reason why that doesn’t happen, though, is because in some ways I fundamentally distrust myself. I worry that if I stop working on this problem for a bit I’ll stop working on it indefinitely, and I worry that I’ll forget what I wanted and why I wanted it, that I’ll have permanently lost something, permanently made my project worse, by stepping away for a moment.
I don’t know whether I’m wrong to feel this way.
Anyway. This illustration is done now (or it better be, by the time this goes up). There are a few more to be done, but they’re all either based on this one and can be quickly made using it as basis or are relatively simple and already sketched out – these, I hope, will be a bit more amenable to scheduling. Other than that, the tasks to be done are the same as they were when I posted last month’s devblog. Hopefully next time I will have more (and more interesting) progress to report.