Timasomo Post #0: Roll Call and Planning
Timasomo FAQ
What is Timasomo?
Timasomo is "Tildes' Make Something Month," a creative community challenge that takes place in the month of November. It was inspired by NaNoWriMo, the National Novel Writing Month.
What are the rules?
Timasomo is self-driven and its goals are self-selected. On November 1st, participants will commit to a creative project (or projects) that they plan to complete within the month of November. There is no restriction on the methods/products of creativity: writing, painting, code, food, photos, crafts, songs -- if it's creative expression for you, it works for Timasomo!
Though most will be participating individually, collaborations are welcome too!
What is the schedule?
Timasomo begins November 1st and ends November 30th. All creative output towards your goal(s) should be confined to this time. This week prior to the start of November is for planning, and there will be a few days at the beginning of December given to "finishing touches" before we have our final thread, which will be a showcase of all the completed works. The showcase date is TBD and will be decided by the participants toward the end of the month, once we have a better idea of what we'll need to do wrap up our projects.
Can I participate?
Yes! Timasomo is open to anyone on Tildes! The greater Tildes community is also encouraged to participate in discussion threads even if you are not actively working towards a creative goal. This is meant to be an inclusive community event -- all are welcome! If you are interested in participating but do not have a Tildes login, please e-mail the invite request address here for an invite to the community.
Thread #0: Roll Call and Planning
Introduce Yourself
If you are planning on participating in Timasomo, please introduce yourself in this thread. Let the community know a little bit about you, what you do, and your past creative history.
Discuss Your Plans
No need to make a formal goal yet -- that will be for Post #1 on November 1st. Here you can simply toss out ideas, throw them around, and start to formalize what you want your specific goal(s) to be. It's always exciting to not only share out what you want to do but to see what others are planning as well.
Share/Solicit Tips, Tricks, and Resources
Have some great pointers? Share them here! Need some great pointers? Ask for them!
Team Up!
Participants do not have to be individuals, so feel free to join forces. Post a request here if your creative vision involves more than one person. Teaming up can also be useful for people who want to play supportive roles (e.g. playtester, editor, etc.). If you're not wanting to participate directly in achieving your own creative goal but are willing to volunteer help in other ways, offer your services up in this thread!
Get Excited!
This is going to be a great event! I'm already hyped to start my project, and I know others are as well! We're one week away from the starting line!
Meta
My Role
I see myself as a "facilitator" in that I'm posting these weekly threads, but I want this to be a Tildes-driven event rather than a kfwyre-driven one. As such, feel free to provide ideas, feedback, etc. on how you would like this to go or anything I'm either missing or missing the mark on.
Posts
Furthermore, please do not consider "Timasomo" to be something "owned" by me. I consider it a part of this community. As such, if you would like to post threads for the event outside of our weekly Friday threads, feel free! Maybe you want to share a story, talk about a breakthrough, or seek help with something. All are fine, and please don't feel confined to the weekly discussion threads to do so (though if you'd like to share there, that's fine too). The only thing I ask is that, for any additional posts, you tag your submissions with "timasomo" so that they can be easily found under one roof.
Hi, my name is a_s_k. I'm a fabricator. I work in Film&TV as a propmaker and I run a small woodshop for myself and a few others. I'm also interested in CAD/CAM and open-source
I've been thinking about Timasomo since the first interest post and I definitely plan to participate. I've got plenty of projects on my back burner, but I'm not sure which one of them I'd like to pursue.
Some options:
-build a piece of furniture
-finish a first-draft CAD model of an open-source housing project I'm working on
-implement an orbital simulator in Python
Let me know if any of those projects sound interesting.
Looking forward to Timasomo!
All three of those sound very interesting in very different ways! Also, I'm curious as to exactly what "open-source housing project" means?
No worries! I intentionally wanted Timasomo to fit "over" NaNoWriMo so that anyone doing NaNo would be able to use that as their participation for Tima, while still allowing for other people to do other writing or even non-writing tasks.
I have hosted my websites in the past using Netlify. It's super convenient for just hosting something quickly without having to worry about much. It hosts straight from git and deploys on every push to master, so it's great for just a no hassle experience. You can also buy a domain directly from Netlify or use your own. Currently, my website DivideTweet is hosted there, and I have had no problems with using it with or without a domain.
Github lets you host your website from a Github repo, for free, on the domain of
username.github.com.There are a few "barebones" open-source blogging tools where all you have to do is put a Markdown file into the folder.
Best of luck!
Yeah, like @spit-evil-olive-tips says, if you don't mind using a static site generator, I'd highly recommend doing that. The process will be a little different than what you described, but not by much. It should go something like this:
There will be some initial setup that you need to do, but that's really it for the process of adding new posts.
There are a lot of options for static site generators, it probably mostly just depends which language and/or templating language (for creating the theme/HTML) you want to use. I use Pelican for the Tildes Blog and Docs sites because it's Python and Jinja like the site itself.
I'm kfwyre, your resident
askthread poster and unsolicited oversharer.I've tried Nanowrimo several times before and have never successfully completed it, but I've always ended up glad that I attempted it. I also love videogames and love the idea of making my own, but after getting in over my head with both Unity and Godot in years past, I realized that making a whole game is a skillset I would have to dump a lot of time and effort into before I was able to come up with anything even serviceable.
The only successful game-like things I've done have been in a platform called Twine which is an interactive fiction platform that lets you make text-based "choose your own adventure" type games. For this coming month, I'm going to attempt to transition to something a little more "gamey" than Twine and try to make something in Ren'Py, an engine for visual novels. My goal will likely be to just write the text of a kinetic novel. If I'm feeling particularly ambitious, I might opt to implement some choices/branching, but if I can simply have a readable short story in Ren'Py by the end of this, I'll be happy.
One of the areas I won't be able to take care of myself is art and music. If anyone has any resources for public domain assets that I could use for the visual and audio portions of my game, that would be great. Again, I'm not considering them essential to what I make right now (I'm focused only on the writing and on getting comfortable with Ren'Py), but it would be nice to be able to include those aspects partly so I can learn how they work in Ren'Py and partly because it'll make whatever visual novel I write a more complete experience.
I was thinking of trying to make a game for Timasomo as well, and was initially considering doing something with Twine too. It looks super simple and perfect for a Choose Your Own Adventure interactive fiction game, but I was also considering trying something a little more ambitious using Godot instead.... Although I am probably much more likely to actually follow through with something in Twine, so maybe I should just stick with that to start. :P
p.s. For anyone else thinking about trying their hand at gamedev for this, but not knowing where to start:
https://itch.io/game-development/engines/most-projects
I started up a tutorial for Godot, but it was a lot, especially for someone like me with little technical background. I'm hoping to return to it next summer, when I'm off work and can really give it a go, as I'd love to be able to create tiny little game-jam-type stuff.
Twine, on the other hand, is dead simple. I'd recommend it to anyone.
If you're going the CYOA/IF route, there's also ChoiceScript. I haven't personally used it, but it drives all of Choice Of Games's games, and those work really well.
Yeah, fully featured engines can be a bit overwhelming to learn. I have used Unity a decent amount before though, so Godot shouldn't be too much of a learning curve for me as they appear to be very similar. However, motivation is my major hurdle at the moment, so I suspect the easier something is to learn and work with, the better.... which is why Twine sounds like the safer choice for Timasomo for me. :P
And while I wasn't intending to do a traditional CYOA game, it will have elements of that, so I think I can make Twine work for what I want to do. At the very least I can do all my writing and lay it all out using Twine first, and then move to Godot if I like what I produce and want to keep working on it.
p.s. I have never heard of Choice Of Games, but some of their games they look/sound neat. I will have to check some of them out!
Regarding Choice Of Games, it's also noteworthy that a lot of their games do an admirably good job with LGBTQ+ representation. Many will state on their summary page the options for the player character's identity development. Here's one such statement from Heroes of Myth:
Now, I haven't played Heroes of Myth so this is not an endorsement of that particular game, but that kind of statement is common if you look through their catalog.
Extra neat! It always warms the cockles of my heart when there is decent representation in a game. I am currently playing Outer Worlds at the moment, one of the companions is asexual, and at one point during their side-quests you can express the same sentiment, which was nice to see. Even something as minor as that can really help with achieving normalization, IMO.
One of my ace friends was just telling me about this! Makes sense, as Fallout: New Vegas did a great job with thoughtful and compelling representation, so TOW is upholding that aspect as a spiritual successor.
Also, did I misread your post or did it say "warmed the cookies of my heart" pre-edit? No judgment if that's the case, I just wanted to let you know that I'm stealing that phrasing!
ROFL, no I didn't say "cookies of my heart", though that would have been pretty funny if I had. The edit was adding in the final sentence. And yeah, Obsidian has a decent track-record with LGBT+ representation in their games, so I am glad to see they are continuing the trend.
Ah, my mistake! Regardless, I'm totally going to make that a thing. To me, using "cookies" makes the whole phrase so much more, well, heartwarming!
Yo and hello! I go by xstresedg on a couple places on the world wide web (extremely stressed and on the edge is how it came about, pronounced ex-stress-edge). I'm a 30 year old Canada, I like video games, manga, anime, comics, cartoons, cartoon-inspired television (i.e. Arrow, The Flash, etc) and film, as well as just regular old film haha.
My plan for Timasomo is to create a one-month game. I have a few ideas of the direction I want to take it, but I've not fully decided yet. My only issue will be music, so it may have to incorporate free to use music and sound effects, unless I discover I have a talent for making chiptune esque music. We'll see.
Have you made any games before? Also, what engine are you planning on using?
I have been dabbling with game design for years, mostly through the RPG Maker suite of software, and most recently Godot. I've also played around with Game Maker and Sphere in the past. I have not successfully finished a game, and while I had released games in the past for RPG Maker, they've been lost to the ether.
The engine I'm using is the Godot Engine. Updates will be made to the posts here on Tildes, but will also be available by my website and/or my Twitter. Apologies for the lackluster website, I've yet to actually try to make it pretty and cohesive.
Apologies?! Quite the opposite -- celebrate it! Your eager post about making it was my very favorite thing from the Timasomo interest survey! It made me smile from ear to ear.
Thanks! :)
I hope I can really pull something out and make a fun banger for everyone.
Hi, I'm Seven, and I'm planning on making a game of some sort, most likely in Unity. I'm a college student, and I'm working on other games and projects for my classes, but I hope to find the time to work on this as well.
I have a lot of game/general programming ideas, but I find it hard to get started on anything, so when I saw this thread, I decided to use it as an opportunity to actually make something from start to finish for once.
I am currently in both Artificial Intelligence and Computer Game Technologies classes, and in my AI class, we just learned about swarm AI, and something that caught my attention was flocking boids as something I could make a game out of. Right now, I am just looking into it in the preliminary stages, but I definitely want to make something of it.
A couple of games that I know use some swarming behavior that might be worth taking a look at (both pretty similar gameplay style):
Thanks, I'll definitely check them out!
Not gonna commit much data to this right now. Just checking in, making it known I'm taking part.
My project will probably be finishing the first draft of the Frontiers RPG system player manual. Lots of info's gonna still be omitted, but at least I'll have something to edit later.
Best of luck to everyone taking part.
My name is moocow1452, (my handle anyway) I'm one of those writers who never get around to writing anything, and I'm looking to change that. During Tilmasomo, I would like to get the draft for the first Volume of my Graphic Novel done, in time for it to be submitted to the Viz Originals web portal, whenever that activates. I'm currently partway through, roughly 40% done with the roughest of drafts, and to meet my goal, I would need to at least write up to the point in the story where I would be comfortable stopping and save the bulk of editing for the month after.
I wish you all the best of luck, and the velocity of a non-denominational deity of your choice.
Wondering if anyone would be interested in collaborating on a comic, featuring the world's shittiest superhero - Florida Man. I am something of an expert on his misadventures and shenanigans, but what I lack is any kind of actual talent. I've seen other attempts on this theme, but they all fall flat. I think that, using real Florida Man stories that can be coherently linked through narrative, we could do better.
I would need someone to do the art. That is crucial, because I have zero talent in this space. Also, if someone wants to write the actual dialogue, I'm not the most amazing wordsmith so that could be a benefit too. I can provide the narrative arc, help keep things organized, and the overall vision.
I absolutely LOVE this idea. Brilliant.
I honestly think if the dice land just right, it could lead to a movie deal. The pool of unclaimed super heroes is pretty thin, and I mean come ON Ant Man has multiple movies now.
Hullo! I'm Gyrfalcon. I am a college student who is fully into the "just trying to graduate" phase of my degree.
My creative history is somewhat mixed. I have done a little bit of programming and video editing on a past project. Programming is great, and I'm hoping it will factor into my job search. Video editing... not so much. But I have recently taken an interest in web design, and particularly how a website's front end and back end design come together to define its performance and the amount of energy used to serve, transmit, and display it.
My goal is to make a website/blog. The site will be statically generated so that the server doesn't have to generate anything on the fly, saving processing power. Additionally, I would like to make each page under 1 MB, to save on energy and load times there. I've already started a bit of my project and selected some tools, but I won't do any more until November 1st to stay in the spirit!
Hey guys! I'm SUDO and I am a software developer in the Midwest. I am also a
part time graduate student studying computer science. I work for a small
software shop and do a little bit of everything (desktop, mobile and services).
My creative history mostly consists of a graveyard of empty GitHub repos on my
profile. I have also dabbled in writing and a little bit of digital art in the
past. Nothing too crazy though.
I am not 100% sure what to do yet for the month of November. A have a few ideas
for some programming/technical projects and I think it would be great to tackle
one of those and do a write-up about it on my blog which is sorely lacking some
material.
A few ideas I have for programming are:
There are few other things that I am interested by that are not code. I think it
would be sweet to do a series of smaller projects in writing or art for the
month.
I have always wanted to try my hand at brewing beer too.. :)
But yeah, lots of ideas at this point. I am totally taking part in this, but I
need to spend some time thinking about what I want to tackle.
Hey, I'm Greg: occasional poster, chronic overthinker, professional developer, amateur cook.
I started out with the idea of finding something to make with my hands, as it's been far too long since I've done so, but I've realised I won't realistically have access to tools or time in one place this time round. What I also realised is that even though I write code every day, it's been a very long time since I've written anything fun just for the sake of it - that's something I very much can fix!
So, in the spirit of excess ambition: mobile app Thing a Week. Four apps, each on at least one storefront, by the end of November.
They might not be good, they might not be slick, but hopefully they'll either raise a smile or do some small useful task. More importantly, they'll be built for the fun of it, without business pressure to worry about.
I have a whole list of (mostly silly) ideas, and I'm very open to more - anything that does a single, well defined thing that might feasibly be built in a week. Task one is going to be picking four that sound good, and then it's all about the building.
I have a note in my phone called "App Ideas" where I randomly jot down things that I think would make for great apps. Here's one that I would love to use:
Cravings
For users that want help combating cravings for whatever it is they're trying to fight in their life (e.g. junk food, alcohol, etc.). Users define what it is that they crave and then they can type in a whole list of reasons for why they shouldn't cave to the craving. After this setup is done, the use of the app is simple: the user opens the app and hits a button when they're experiencing a craving, and the app randomly selects one of their reasons to display to them, hopefully encouraging them to avoid caving.
Example: I'm about to leave work after a long, stressful day, and I want nothing more than to take my car through the McDonald's drive-thru. I open the app, hit the "fast food" button, and it pops up with one of my pre-written messages that says "Fries aren't worth the calories -- you don't even like them that much anyway!" or "You're already down 12 pounds. Keep that going!"
An app like this would basically allow me to be my own shoulder angel when I'm considering doing something unhealthy for impulsive or emotional reasons.
That's a great idea! Useful, super simple, and something I can see myself using. I really like this one.
Brevity is wit, best not to devalue it.
I know, I was saying that since your website was a joke, you would ruin the joke by adding onto it. Like what I'm doing now...
alright, I'm down.
I have an idea of doing something ~multimedia~ ... focused on writing and music. but in a nicely (or badly) designed webpage. my writing is probably crap, but I think I do an alright job at making music. hell, maybe I'll even draw a thing or two.
well, does anyone have any tips on how to get music to play contextually? Like, different audio plays depending on how far down you've scrolled, or something.
okay! I like it! Introducing yourself with your handle is hilarious, but - I'm euphoria066, and my creative history is... extensive, I guess? I went to college intending to get a bachelor of design in illustration, but I decided I wanted to try more of the options at the school, so left the BD program and instead I have a bachelor of fine arts with a focus on metalsmithing, which means I paid a great many pretty pennies to be able to play around creatively with lots of different mediums for 4 years.
I'm now a goldsmith (I design and make jewellery) by trade which is fairly creative on a day by day basis, and as hobbies I like to cook/bake, I've been playing around with small-batch wine/mead-making, visible mending, home renos, and crocheting. (I'm bad at focusing on one thing at a time.)
For a one-month proj, I'd love to either try to cook like, 20 recipes out of one cookbook? is that a realistic number for a month? I love cookbooks and I have a ton and don't really cook out of them.
Or, I recently spent a month trying to crochet my first sweater, and I am extremely not happy with the outcome. So I'd like to frog the entire thing and start over (expensive yarn), and that would probably take me about a month to redo!
I dabble in some creative outlets like sketching and pixel art. I've started a few projects in game design and programming but tend to lose steam before accomplishing much.
My current projects are a collaboration on a python script for analysising steam play statistics of groups and building an elevated dog feeder as part of a wood workers fighting cancer event.
A recent idea I've had is to use the api of the radio station triple j to create a ongoing database of all tracks played and scraping lyrics from another source to create a lyric/time window based shazam for songs I've heard on the radio.
I've had a board game idea on the back-burner for a long while which was inspired by the bank rush scene in It's a Wonderful Life. Some of the other game projects in this thread are heavily tempting me to pick up this project again, though as when I put it down the major barrier will be finding time and willing subjects to play test it.
Hi, I'm anahata.
I'm getting back into writing poetry after not doing much for several years. I've tried my hand at writing fiction, but find that I get too lost in all the planning details. I find that I want to have the macroscopic and the microscopic details in my head all at the same time, and of course that won't work. Beyond that, I have such a love for the English language, the literary and stylistic devices that one can use, the vocabulary, the rich etymologies... all of it. Poetry provides a freedom of expression that is extremely difficult to explore in prose. I feel that poetry allows the writer to explore and embrace more of the language than any other written or spoken form. Reading about all of the techniques and things I can do in a poem is thrilling, like the infinite expanses of space. How can I resist?
My plans are to develop my skills as a poet, both this month and every month. I formally started this in October, but being able to share what I'm writing with this community should provide some motivation. Much like poetry itself has no real rules, I'm not setting myself any goals for this but to write consistently. What does consistently mean? I want to be able to say, at the end of the month, that I've put enough effort into writing and exploring the art and craft that I don't feel guilty for having wasted the month. This provides accountability without pressure. If life comes up and I can only write a bit, then only writing a bit is what I'll be happy with. If nothing comes up and I'm able to write a lot, writing a lot will be what I'm happy with.
I have a few poems I've written that I'm considering posting here, and we'll see how that goes.
Awesome!
I think poetry is among the least "forcible" of creative endeavors, so I think your decision to not use rigid or strict requirements and instead focus more on motivation is a smart one. I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
Extruding a poem leaves the emotion, the humanity, and thus the art, behind. The words come out, but there is no there there. And thank you for the encouragement! Looking forward to comments and thoughts to help me grow as a poet and artist.