I am just entering my last week of summer semester, so this will be a bit of a lighter update from me.
First off, thank you for your input on my logo design! This is a color version of the direction I’d like to go with it. It’s likely a few more iterations away from the final version, but it’s almost there.
Coming soon as an update to my socials and website!
Second, my game Puzzle Milk Tea is now on sale for the Steam Summer Sale. You can pick it up at https://store.steampowered.com/app/3197490/Puzzle_Milk_Tea/. Are there any other games you’ve got on your wish list? Let me know with a reply!
Third, I’ve just finished the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better” by David Epstein and it has really changed my perspective on my approach to creativity. It’s a great book and I am recommending it to everyone I’m talking to. After finishing David’s book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” (also a great read), I was looking for something new to start and saw that he had released this book just last month. On the surface, it appeared to be a book about “creating a fence around a playground to promote more creativity”, but it instead held some very important stories that challenged my assumptions about the originality of the greatest creators and how creativity really comes about.
What I didn’t realize, and learned by reading this book, is that it is actually very common for creators to remix and expand upon existing work. There are many examples I was very much aware of, such as The Lion King being based on Hamlet, but the book introduced many that I was not familiar with. One of the new ones to me that was mentioned in the book was that Romeo and Juliet was actually a remix of an existing work.
This realization made me question my own decision to not use assets more often for creating my own games. Someday I’d love to have a game where everything was made bespoke, but it’s much more important for me now to just finish projects. This means that I need to shift my approach to learning how to use assets and remix them in ways that are new and fresh rather than rejecting them all together. Along the way, I can continue to connect with others and see if there are opportunities to team up and make something that is totally new.
This is just one of the reflections I had from this book and I hope I’ll have an opportunity to share more thoughts through YouTube content and this newsletter. Keep an ear out if you hear me talking about something in this space of creativity and constraints. It might just be inspired from the book!
I hope you’re having a wonderful start to summer and thank you as always for supporting my work. Every reply I get genuinely makes me smile and motivates me to continue moving forward. Let me know what you’re looking forward to in July and I hope to talk to you again soon!
Cheers,
Connor