Facets of BrettW

Two steps forward… one spin around on the spot? Read more…

Previously I reviewed Far Cry 3 on the surface level and deemed it to be a pretty good game. In this post I’ll examine the writing and explain why I think Far Cry 3 is a great game.

Beware, there are countless spoilers. If you want to experience the game yourself without my biases, play it first.

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Mass Effect 3 is out and bringing an end to a much-loved series. However with its arrival, there has been a growing chorus of dislike for the ending. So much so that people have started protests to “retake” the ending, protesting seemingly non-aggressively by making all proceeds go to Child’s Play.

I, however, liked the ending. I thought I might lay out some of my thoughts on the ending and this protest. I’m not really trying to persuade anyone. There’s just some interesting talking points.

For the love of God, if you haven’t finished Mass Effect 3, DON’T READ THIS BLOG UNTIL YOU DO. It’s going to be totally spoiler-tastic. You should judge the ending on your own terms, then join the discussion.

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Taking last week off worked out pretty well. While the results weren’t particularly pyrotechnic, it was a good way to get the majority of my Kung Fu Legends game engine out of the way. I managed to get the splashscreen working (even with multiple pictures, fade-to-black transitions and skip-ahead-on-keyboard-mash). MyGUI is a reasonably good GUI library. Sure some of the source code comments are in Russian and certain whole class hierarchies are only in the documentation if you know about them already, but all-in-all I got it working and it’s neat. Beats the hell out of programming all that stuff yourself. I also got to work on the details of the actual game Kung Fu Legends. Nothing to show for it yet but steady as she goes.

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So I’m back from Varuna (and braved the chaos which is returning to work ) My week away was quite pleasant and productive. I did a reading of my first two chapters, which got a good response. I wrote about 9,000 words, which is less than my usual target of 10,000 in a week, but I was writing poems and not a lot of dialogue. Dialogue almost writes itself and a simple mess-about scene can blow out to 1,000 words quite easily. I’m happy with what I wrote – I had to tackle an emotionally traumatic scene which always leaves me a little drained. I tend to get myself into the mood that I’m writing towards, like a mild form of method acting. The scene that resulted was good, but perhaps not amazing. I might get it on another revision. Read more…

I’ve been on a few writing retreats now and one thing that has struck me is that writers, no matter their preferred genre, love to tell a good ghost story. I enjoy them as they have that simple but effective approach to storytelling. However, I’m not too proud to avoid mentioning that it freaks the hell out of me for quite a while afterwards. Read more…

So I’ve arrived at my writing retreat. To some people, it’s a funny idea: spend a week and a not insignificant amount of money to go make yourself bash out words. It smells a lot like work and why spend all that time and money when you could be on a beach drinking pina coladas? I tend to average about 10,000 words or more in a week on my retreats. If the same task was given to most people (“write 10,000 or more words in a week”) they’d have horrific flashbacks to school assignments. Read more…

One of the more mature projects I’ve been working on is my novel Breathe. I’ve been working on it on and off more maybe five or six years, and only really applied myself to it in the last three. In 2006, instead of working on my PhD thesis, I took a gamble and wrote the first few chapters so I could enter a competition held by the ACT Writers Centre. The prize was to work with a mentor on my novel, for twenty hours or so. To my amazement, I won it! My mentor is John Clanchy and we’ve since formed a great mateship that has long outlast the 20 hours I had won. He reads my work and offers comments. We often catch up for a beer and just chat about everything.

I bring this all up now because I’m going on a writing retreat soon. I typically blog a bit whilst on retreat, but only on fiction writing. I tend to have a mental shift and become a lot more arty. Apparently my vocabulary and sentence structure improves markedly. So you know what you’re getting into if you’re a regular reader. Read more…