It's a creative outlet
05 December 2021
My goal for the first year of bringing Strife back was to create an episode every month for a year and then see how I felt. I managed 7/8 out of those 12 months (depending how generous you'd want to be counting!
Like lots of creative endeavours there are various stages to creating a new episode, each with different technical along with mental challenges. I've put this chart together to reflect how I find the whole process.
Preproduction is in many ways the most creative and fun part of the process. Nothing is locked down yet and I can spark my imagination by looking at Duke3D maps other authors have creative or what's going on in gaming to come up with ideas.
Typically once I have a few ideas if I'm on the right track they'll start to snowball and the episode will start to write itself. I'll then start sketch the scenes out visually on paper, to work out the positions of each actor in the scene and ideally have the speech bubbles run from left to right.
Finally I can then start filming, which is where the enjoyment gets reduced. Although there's fun to be had from finding interesting camera angles and setting up the scene, it can be quite a lot of work to stage each scene and then jump between different maps as required for an individual episode.
The last stage is the most gruelling, which requires the speech bubble to be placed into each scene along with any post-production visual effects. Perhaps if I had a better tool for placing the speech bubbles this would be less work, but as it stands it's the most demoralising part.
Almost there now - after checking over the filmed episode several times to pick up the multiple grammar and spelling issues (before Sluggy can find them) I'll upload it to the Strife Forever FTP site ready to unlock on the 1st of the next month
I get a real buzz when I upload a finish episode, but it's a real rollercoaster getting to that point.
I typically release more content on my StrifeStreams.com website, as it's much quicker and easier to put something up there. Of course the content there is a little different, but that's really the point
Cheers
Mav
