Mastering and Papercraft Props

[Sabre]

TL:DR? Skip to the bottom.

After a couple of days procastinating I have come to the decision I am spreading myself to thin and being crap at everything. I have decided instead to focus on a few disaplines, but I'm not sure which.

To master something, you have to put 10,000 hours in. Assuming you don't eat sleep ect, that's about a year, in practice that's about 5-10 years. Being autistic, I learn faster, and I'm not distracted by the need to social every 5 minutes.

However, on my list of stuff Im doing.

Videos

Programing

Computing

Animation

Drawings

Comics

as well as reading, playing games and so on.

Since I'm making little progress, I think I will put programing on hold until Rage comes out, and focus not just on programming, but learning 1 engine specifically.

I have at least 1 video to finish before I give that up. That said I've just started developing a regular viewer base.

I've been putting some thought into going bad into animation and making toy films again. While I don't have that many toys anymore, or a camera, I think that the rise of papercraft would allow me access to tools I need to make sets and propers quickly and cheaply out of card. No one watched them when I made some in my teenage years, but the popularity of robot chicken and Arby and the Chief means that their might be a hunger for it. What do you think? Would you watch toy films?

Basicly, I'm undecided on what I want to do. I can't keep spreading myself thin like this otherwise I will produce nothing but crap and unfinished works. I guess I'm asking what you want to see. What do you want me to turn my creative energy at for the next 8 months? Should I focus on video reviews? Comics? Animated toy films?

[Mr. Krystal]

As someone like you mentally, I suggest picking the thing you want to do most (not the abstraction: programming, but the specific: your game about [whatever]). Then you will pick up the skills you need along the way, without specifically setting out to learn them. For instance, in the process of creating and maintaining the Krystal Archive, I have taught myself Javascript, Web Design, Video Editing, Video Encoding, Perl Scripting, and various other automation systems. I never set out to specifically become a master at any of these, but because I had a goal, I learned what I needed at the time and a little bit more for context. You need to make something, anything, quickly, even if it is very low quality. Doing so will help you become better for the next time, and so on. Pretty soon your scraps will become better than other hobbyist's work. As for what you should do specifically, I can't tell you. You need to decide that one for yourself. It helps to pick the one you are personally most interested in, but you can actually succeed just by picking one at random. As long as you follow through and don't give up, you'll get to do what you want in the end.

[Sabre]

Seems logical. Unfortunatly I made a huge mistake early on, and got really unlucky. As I have said before, I had an idea for a first game, a buy mode for Half Life 2. It sounded quite simple on paper. Kill an enemy, add a point, you can then spend points on items using a simple menu. The main mechanic for various game ideas I have in my head. I've seen it done as a map, so I though coding it would be fairly straight forward. Just trigger entities in the right order.

Unfortunatly, Half Life 2s engine updates broke alot, and the outdated tech and large number of different source engines is apparently bad for a beginer. Not only that, but what I want to do is apprently really tough to do in single player Half Life. I was thinking of making it as a map, and going from there, but again, currently it's a bit iffy due to recent updates.

The new id engine is looking interesting, at E3 id said the game was pushed back to early 2011. My plan was to wait for it, but I'm not sure what to do until then.

As for doing what I want, I want to do it all, but can't practically. I have made loads of comics no one has read, made films no one watched, and so on. I generally find it's not worth the effort. I might as well just play with toys or sit and daydream in that case.