Timasomo Post #1: It Begins!
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 #1: It Begins!
Timasomo begins whenever it hits 12:00 AM on November 1st, wherever you are on the globe. Dive into your projects! Here's the task list for this thread:
Formally Identify Your Goal
In the last post, we all talked about what we were aiming for. Now is the time to set a specific goal that you intend to commit to. Be both optimistic and reasonable!
Map Out Your Plan (If You Need One)
Some people like seeing where their creativity takes them, and some people like having a formal process to follow. If you're the type that needs a plan, set one up an share it here (if you want to).
Conduct a Self-Forecast
Evaluate yourself as a creator. What are you good at? What do you need to really focus on? How strong is your follow-through? Forecast how this will go for you and try to plan around your own strengths and weaknesses.
Cheer Others On
This won't be as necessary at the beginning when optimism, resources, and stamina are all at their highest, but it's always fine -- nay, encouraged -- to post positive, uplifting, and supportive comments to others in Timasomo. Even if you are not participating, you can always cheer others on!
Make Posts As You Go
I will be posting these threads every Friday. Feel free to keep a running thread within the post of how things are going for you. It's okay to come back and re-post in here with updates.
With that said, these posts might get a little cluttered so some might prefer their own conversation space, or would just rather have one that they're directing apart from mine. If you'd rather make your own topic about your project or anything related to Timasomo, feel free! I encourage multiple Timasomo posts over the course of the month, not just these weekly check-ins. Just make sure you tag your post "timasomo" so we can easily find it.
Best of luck to ALL participants! Let's go MAKE SOMETHING.
Meta
Suggestions
If anyone has anything they want me to add to this post or suggestions for the next one, let me know either here or by PM!
So, I guess my goal isn't so much creative as I'm not creating a work of fiction, but I think I am going to use it as an opportunity to start keeping a journal. I haven't done anything like it before but I constantly find myself wanting to write my thoughts down and keep a record of my perspective as well as a daily gratitude list. I went to Barnes and Noble earlier today and saw they had some really cool leather journals. But I am conflicted because I could just do it digitally for free on one of my many screens.
Try using a plain-text file (
.txt) first. See how it feels.If it feels awkward, or like it's not what you want, switch to handwriting.
You could put price before your feelings – or you could go into the thing you want as if you're gonna enjoy it.
I actually found a whole bunch of notebooks I had and an actual empty journal that I completely forgot about in my closet. I started writing yesterday to see how it felt and then wrote again today. I'm still conflicted on which one to use but I may use both and just upload completed pages I write to maybe one day use OCR to extract text.
Part of me is drawn to the .txt file but then my mind will immediately start thinking about journaling as a data collection means rather than an experience that I am expecting to help me connect more with my feelings and goals. I think the pen and paper is the most intimate to me for that reason as it makes me think much more about my feelings as the writing pace is much slower.
I'm sure I will be thinking and trying different things over time. I'm happy with the results so far and can see why journaling is recommended. I have found it so far to be pretty meditative.
My advise is: put your experience first. Journaling is an intimate, vulnerable thing. Whatever ramifications digitizing your writing may have is secondary – as in, it should come second to your having a good experience of letting your thoughts crystallize in writing. None of the auxiliary experiments you may run are possible without the journalling part first – and it just so happens that it might do you good to journal.
Focus on the main part, and branch out when it feels right to do so.
I would recommend doing it by hand! Obviously there's a convenience to using a screen to keep a journal (syncing, write from anywhere, etc) but I think it's so much easier to turn it into a habit if you use pen and paper: it's a novel experience, and you're not distracted by all the other stuff on your phone/tablet/computer.
I have started by hand and am so far enjoying it. Thank you for taking the time to share your recommendation! I struggle with distractions, especially on my phone so taking a moment to reflect interrupted for 20-30 minutes has been nice.
The most important thing I've found for journalling--or really, any kind of writing--is to be comfortable with your tools, your environment, your approach. Some folks like to say that you don't need anything special to write, that many great writers wrote on dinner napkins and toilet paper and so on. That may be the case for them. It's not for me. It may not be for you. I have extremely exacting requirements for my stationery (part of this is probably my autism coming out), and you may as well. Find what you're comfortable with and stick with it. If you're not comfortable with something, you won't enjoy the process, you won't be able to tolerate the process, which means you're less likely to stick with it. If digital works for you, do digital. If you want a fancy journalling app and you feel comfortable using it, use it. If pencil on toilet paper works for you, use it.
Amen.
Best of luck.
You'll be surprised how quickly you get used to it.
Best of luck.
I've tried NaNo in the past, and between bands, gigs, social life, work, and gym, I usually end up losing steam because I'm trying to juggle too many balls. That said, I like this idea, and so my tentative goal is to get a website up and running for my band.
My plan
I already have a very basic, single-page website written and ready to go, just need to find some relatively cheap hosting to get it out there. Things I would like to add are:Nice to have, but probably more work that it's worth:
Forecast
As I said, I've got a pretty basic page together already, so it's a case of extending that into a multi-page website. I think that's reasonably doable in the time allowed, but making it look modern and work on mobile devices is going to be the sticking point I think. Above all, I want to try to keep the website quick and responsive, avoiding the bloat of too much JS and too many assets.By next Friday
I hope to have the website actually online and available to visit, with the beginnings of the additional sections mentioned above.If you need assistance with that at any point of Timasomo, feel free to post it to the Programming Questions Weekly or PM me. I've been doing web design on a semi-professional level for a few years now. Yours seems like a good project to help.
My suggestion is: use Timasomo as a way to build it by hand and dirty (as in – by adding whatever it takes to make what you want) first. Various static generators will make your job easy, and if your aim is not to learn web design, I advise you use them, instead. If it is, doing what sounds like a simple website by hand first will help you learn. You can automate and relegate functionality afterwards.
Best of luck.
EDIT: decapitalize an accidental capital letter
Awesome, thanks! Definitely keen to go in by hand and do it all myself, much more scope to learn this way!
Excellent. The enthusiasm is good to see.
HTML and CSS both can be quirky at times. Don't be discouraged if you don't understand how something works at first: you get used to the quirks.
I'm taking the opportunity to get back to programming just for the enjoyment of it! One mobile app each week, for four by the end of the month - that way they have to be simple, fun, and single-purpose; I won't have the time to get bogged down in making the unfinished, over designed behemoth that would otherwise be my default when given a blank slate.
As I put it in the last thread:
I'm committing to four by the end of the month, but not necessarily that I'll be able to release them weekly - that'd be ideal, but the time I'll be able to dedicate to this is likely to come in fits and starts. I definitely won't be able to make a start until Sunday at the earliest, for example.
Right now the top two on the list are @kfwyre's excellent Cravings app, and a beautifully pointless idea that a friend sugggested called Cat Pixelator: it takes a photo, runs a quick (and entirely unnecessary) image recognition step to detect if there's a cat present, and if so applies a "cats behind square pattern windows"-style pixelation effect.
I've got quite a few more ideas of my own, but the floor is still open for the remaining two spots if anyone has anything that fit the bill!
If you want to make something boring but unexpectedly-useful: a counter that goes up by one when you tap the screen. Just that.
Basically a tally counter in app form, you mean? I can definitely see that being handy!
It's impossible to build this app without inevitable feature creep resulting in a cookie clicker clone.
Awesome! Thanks for running with my idea. I'm looking forward to seeing what you make of it!
I'm going to use Timasomo as a challenge to finish the first draft of the Frontiers RPG system's player manual.
On one hand, it's designed to be a simple system, and it's the worldbuilding that takes most of the space.
On the other, even a simple system must be thorough in its descriptions.
Then again, it's the first draft – meant to be a little ugly and a little underworked.
For the sake of the first draft, I'm going to omit most of the lore, and I'm going to keep some of the systems as close to the ground as possible until I can figure out how to make them work within the current frame. Basically, it's going to be a player-facing presentation of the system: an introduction into how it works and what cool features it has, with just enough lore to help the player understand the situation their characters find themselves in.
Systems that require lists will only have examples or generalized structures at that stage.
I will present the project in text form. Where, I don't yet know. Maybe I'll turn it into a PDF and host it on Google Drive. Maybe I'll have a website to host it on in HTML by then.
Well, I got at least a third of the way through the comic at this point through picking away at it and editing on the fly. If I want to have a draft finished by the end of November, I have to put all of that in the corner and just write consistently, at dedicated points in time and without reworking it and polishing it or future mapping it or avoiding it all together. I'll have to actually write something if I want to participate.
Piece of cake.
By the end of November I plan to have written a complete "visual short story" using the Ren'Py engine. This goal encompasses the writing only, though I am going to try to find art assets that I can use for backgrounds, characters, and music (I have no skill to create my own). I will set a conservative floor of 7,000 words, though I expect to go past that. Also, while I would like for my story to have robust choices, I will be happy with it simply being a "kinetic" story (i.e. one with no choices that you just read from start to finish).
This week I plan to familiarize myself with Ren'Py and then play around with it to get a feel for what I can do. I have three different story ideas, and I'll know better which one will suit this project when I know better how the framework I'm using functions.
I know visual novels are primarily told through dialogue, so that will be a writing hurdle for me, as I'm not exactly great at it. That said, I'm looking for the opportunity to stretch my legs in that area and see if I can't develop some interesting characters and situations.
As excited as I am about this project, I'm unfortunately going to be off to a very slow start. I have been quite ill this past week and have spent most of my time in bed but not able to actually sleep, so I hardly have energy to stay awake, much less embark on a new creative endeavor.
I am hoping I am in the last stages of it and, even if I'm not, at this point I'm hoping to just be able to sleep uninterrupted for a couple of hours. I don't forsee myself really getting off the ground with this until I'm healthier, so I might not make a lot of progress in these first couple of days.
Update: Illness delayed my start, so I wasn't able to meaningfully dive into Timasomo until today. This is my day one! Three days late!
I started with Ren'Py's (surprisingly great) built-in tutorial, and I'm picking it up way faster than I was expecting to. It's a very easy to use system, and a lot of stuff I thought I was going to have to learn how to implement is handled for me, so it looks like the project is going to be almost entirely focused on the writing itself, which is good. Unfortunately this also means if I churn out a crappy story, I can't blame it on "having to learn the engine." There goes my most valid excuse for mediocrity!
I found some assets I can use on itch.io (link is mildly NSFW). This means my game will officially have artwork! It won't be cohesive or unique by any means, but it will at least be more than text on a black background. Ultimately it'll help the project feel much more like a "game" than the stuff I've made in Twine, which is a goal of mine. I think there will have to be some suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader though, particularly with the character designs, as the ones that are available don't really match my visions.
I've narrowed down the story I want to tell from three options to two. One is very choice-heavy, so I think if I can really learn to master Ren'Py, it'll be the one I pick. The other story is much more situational and is probably the easier of the two, so I think I'll start prototyping with that one once I'm done the tutorial to get a feel for things. In a perfect world, I'd be able to produce both this month, but I'm not holding myself to that.
Anyway, despite my enthusiasm for Timasomo, the month started at an all-time-low for me because I was sick as a dog, but I'm almost fully recovered and now bought-in. The excitement has finally hit me, and I can't wait to get back from work tomorrow so I can dive back in to my project!
Goal
To create a jumping off point for a web project that I've dabbled in. At the end of the month I would like to have enough together that I can be able to focus on content in the future without worrying too much about how I post. The MVP here is:
This Week
This week I just want to get things hosted properly, even if there's still no content and formatting is broken. I know this is a small step but I know I'll probably fiddle with things for other steps along the way so I don't want to get too ambitious.
Forecast
I'm proudly not going to get as far on this as I want because my semester is a mess. But, challenging myself will mean I get more done than I would otherwise, and maybe I'll even sharpen my time management skills.
Looking forward to seeing everyone's final products in December!
Hope: The Stolen Wish
Deep below the cold earth lies a mural of a dragon, plunged deep into its scaled breast is Wish, the sentient long sword; the symbol of hope for the kingdom of Riccar. Five years have passed since the Crown Prince Theo defeated the dragon, sealing it deep below the castle with the sword as its jailer.
However, a disturbing spectacle occurred at the site of an ancient mausoleum, invoking a prophecy foretold in ancient times by the progenitor of the Riccar family, long before the kingdom was established:
"An arrow of red pierces the sky, and darkness awakens from eternal sleep."
The spectacle was of a meteor, glowing a bright red, streaking through the skies. It collided with the mausoleum, smashing through the ceiling and burrowing down deep into the crypt's depths. Earthquakes were felt near the ancient site, with smaller quakes rumbling throughout the surrounding cliffs, forests, and castle-town.
My plan is a short, single chapter game to be completed at the end of the month. It is a re-imagining of the original Gameboy title The Sword of Hope 2 from a dungeon crawling JRPG into a action-platformer reminiscent of Mega Man X or a MetroidVania game.
First image
Plan of Action
movement,jumping, weapon attack, magic attack, defendMy Strengths and Weaknesses
I'm not inherently superior in any of my strengths, and my weaknesses are very present for a final product. I am a decent writer and pixel artist, a mediocre traditional artist, and a sub-par programmer. However, I don't have any particular skill or usable experience in developing music or sound effects. This may be something I will excel with but we will see.
Another big weakness I have is that I tend to abandon projects, even if I'm making good headway. I get bored easily, so I hope that I can keep my head in this project. Whatever state it is in at the end of the month, I will release for people to see.
Update Locations
Looks like I'm the only one doing poetry, or the only one committing to it publicly anyway.
As I mentioned in my first post, my goal is to write enough so that I don't feel that I've slacked off. This means that if I have more time, I can write more, and if I have less time, I can feel comfortable with writing less. I'm doing this to enjoy myself, I'm doing this to grow as a poet and an artist, so putting arbitrary pressure on myself would only be counterproductive.
I don't really have a plan, just that I know I want to write regularly. This is intentionally vague because I've learned that writing creatively in some kind of scheduled structure doesn't work for me. I don't want to be a professional writer, so I don't think it makes sense to enforce the kind of structure that a professional needs to adhere to. I want to have fun with this, I want to enjoy myself, and making a concrete plan with metrics and all of that would just get in the way. The plan is to write what comes to mind, what interests me, and leave editing for later--kind of like the NaNoWriMo approach. Editing poetry requires a very different mindset than writing it.
I'm good at writing a poem to completion once I've started it. Occasionally I'll have trouble with something, like this morning where I was trying to write and my train of thought was interrupted by spilling coffee on my notebook. I'm experimenting with rhythm and meter and some of the stylistic devices I love in poetry, and having a lot of fun with that. What I need to focus on is writing about things outside of the flash of inspiration I've been using before. Sure, as an amateur I can stay within that happy little bubble, but I'd like to be able to write when I have an idea as opposed to when I have an inspired idea. There's an important difference there. Poetry is a bit cheating in terms of follow-through. Unless you're writing epic poetry (I'm not), I can generally finish something in an hour after starting it. Editing, though, is something I'm very new to, something I will need to practice. I'm starting to ask folks for feedback and incorporating their suggestions as applicable, and starting my editing practice that way.
I plan on working on my series of conlangs that I am creating for a couple of stories that I intend to write in the future. I've got the Proto language down (which you can see at my website), but I still have the 30 other languages to branch off and create.
My Goal
I would like to get Proto-Moranosan, the second conlang that I will have created, to a functional state. Now, if you don't know much about conlangs or the process in which they are created, you might not know what a functional state looks like. Well, here I am to help you understand (and also to give myself concrete sub-goals here):Forecast
I already have the rules for how Proto-Toran becomes Proto-Moranosan (as well as how Proto-Toran becomes Old Terasenian if I finish Proto-Moranosan before the end of the month). I also have the bare-bones skeleton of a writing system that could be implemented. However, it's in the logography stage, and as I mentioned before, I want this language to have a syllabary. That'll be some work, but I think it's doable.Weekly Stretch Goal
I hope to have the logography digitized into a font (even though I'm not going to use it in the final form of the language, this will still get me used to using the software to do it). I also hope to get a start on "porting" simple words over from Proto-Toran to Proto-Moranosan.