Like pretty much everyone I’ve ever met I have a ton of unfinished projects. Or unstarted projects, in many cases. So it was easy to brainstorm a list of potential ideas. These are a mix of recent ideas I’ve had inspired by my classes at the SCCA and old projects I’ve been meaning to make for sometimes years.
A lot of these are directly related to my main hobby: creating and running tabletop roleplaying games for my friends. I’ve been running Dungeons and Dragons (and other, similar games) for almost 10 years now. I would love to find a way to share some of the incredible stories that my friends and I have created. That’s where ideas like the podcast and the “game diary” come from.
That’s the idea I explored for this excercise so I’ll give context: a game diary is essentially a summary of what happened in the game recorded either to share with others or just to keep track for yourself. You could write them down in a blog like this one or record yourself. It might sound weird but there’s a market for this kind of thing.
My personal favorites create visuals to go along with it. I’ve seen games turned into comics, puppet shows, or simple animations/animatics. The Legend of Vox Machina, produced by Amazon, is a show based on a game like this.
Without Amazon’s budget, I’d rather create something along the lines of Zee Bashew’s The Cold Road. It’s not fully animated, more like an animatic, with excellent sound effects and narration to bring the story to life.
Why this?
What I took away from Andrew Nedimar’s talk was that his personal projects were for him, not to further his career. I don’t see something like this becoming my life, I just think it’s a really wonderful way to bring the stories I love to life and share them with people outside of my small friend group. Also it would just be fun. That said, I think they would teach me useful skills as well.
I’d love to do design work in any of the overlapping circles that make up this weird venn-diagram: games, animation, video, fantasy, Youtube, etc. I think it would be hugely beneficial to learn more about how these things work and start to build my own online presence in the field.
Mood Board
I pulled together a number of inspirations for my board as well as some art from my first attempt a couple years ago. I got as far as putting together a 2D puppet I could rig for animation before getting overwhelmed and giving up.
I had this idea that I could use tokens on a map, like in the lower left, to give a general overview of the action and cut to rigged animations for more important moments. It was going to be a lot of work and I had no idea what I was doing.
Going back to school has shown me that I can do things I didn’t expect were possible. I’d love to give this project another try.