It's Friday

Warning: Big wall of text ahead!

As I was telling a friend of mine earlier today, it's amazing how changing one little thing can create a domino effect that requires a dozen other things to be changed.

For instance, I added a header to each page a while back that shows the current chapter, how much money you have, and what time of day it is. Well...the fact that that and everything else is black made my textbox look out of place, so I made my textbox black. But then that made my backgrounds look too bright, so I added a small black fade around the edges. But then the drop shadows I'd added to my sprites weren't visible enough anymore, so I had to darken the shadows around all my characters. But then the shadows got cut off on some of them because they didn't have enough extra space around them, so I had to go through and resize them all. But then that broke all of the composite images I'd defined, so then I had to go through and recode all of my sprites.

...That's what I spent my day doing.

The average person probably wouldn't have been bothered by any of that and would have avoided the whole chain, but I am, unfortunately, a bit obsessive when it comes to things like this. To be fair, I have somewhat of a reason to be: in this "market," the best way - and in some cases, the only way - to get your game noticed by any decent number of people is to have a "professional"-looking game. Free games like mine are generally made by people who don't have a lot of money or skills, so they feature "okay" stories and "okay" art. But in that kind of environment, if you can make something that isn't just "okay," and is praised to the point of being "professional" quality, then that is true success in the world of free games like this. "Professional," then, is my goal, and it's not easy to achieve.

What else did I do today besides feeding and justifying my obsession? Well... I read a bunch of feminist articles about the gaming industry that were pretty interesting. That made me stop and reflect a bit on Zuleika's character. I figure that even though she starts out representing everything that is bad about how female characters are portrayed in games - infantile, irrational, overemotional - she does develop into a strong, independent female character who is (hopefully) worthy of being the heroine of the story by the end. That character development is important and shows how different environments affect people. Zuleika starts out child-like because that's how Osirus treated her; even though he tells her that she can "choose her own path," the choices he offers are superficial, with powers granted by him, reinforcing her dependence on him. He wanted her to rely on him for everything, and she did. There is, of course, also the way that she is viewed by society, which impacts how she views herself. Tyraca is definitely not a nation in which women are well-respected or have many rights (and this will probably come up in-game). Chael's country, on the other hand, is based on a matriarchal society, so from the get-go he expects Zuleika be the leader and to take charge....which is completely opposite from how she has always viewed herself. It slowly forces her to reevaluate who she is and what she wants to get out of life.

Okay, that's enough ranting for today. :) Makes me want to take more Women and Gender Studies classes...