Midnight. Fifteen hours to go before we launch episode two of the Anarchy Online animated series. There are still scenes left to render, we're missing sound effects, and the music hasn't been timed to the video.
Deep breath.
It may sound impossible, but it's not. Our team of artists have been awake for, oh, waaay too long. My cat's waiting for me at home, hungry and lonely. I've eaten enough pizza for several lifetimes. The art director hasn't been home for days. And the only thing that keeps us going is sheer bloody-mindedness.
This is the price you pay to work on a biweekly animated show.
Keep in mind, though, that we only have six artists, one animator, one art director, one director-slash-writer, one additional writer, one sound designer, one musician, and one audio director on our team. We produce more than fifteen minutes of video every two weeks. We write our episodes around a developing storyline in an online game, shaped by player actions. We record our voice-overs in New York City, six hours behind us, and an ocean away. And we have two more episodes to go before Christmas.
Another deep breath.
It's great fun, though -- the most fun I've had in years. What we're doing is freakin' impressive, and I'm not talking about the scripts, 'cause writing this is the easy part. If you've ever worked with 3D Studio, you know how long it takes to construct, light, animate, and render a quality scene. Multiply that by fifty.
If
Anarchy Online, the game, is remembered for anything, it won't be the animated show that accompanied it. The game is priority one -- what we're cooking up is the gravy. We're adding the whipped cream and the cherry. We're pushing ourselves to the limit to add a new dimension to online gaming, but what people want most of all is game-play, in-game content, and not fancy videos.
But still...if, through the show, we manage to give players that extra something to help draw them into the game universe, then we've done a good job. If we help them make an emotional connection with the characters and the storyline, we've succeeded.
See, we're not creating the substitute for a good game. We're just giving players something extra, on the side, to make the total experience more fun, more interesting, and more immersive. Hopefully, it's worth all the hard work.
All my life, I've been a reader. At some point, early on, I began to put words to paper. And somewhere along the road I became a writer. It happened slowly -- sometimes I wrote by necessity, not by choice -- but one day I realised that I'd actually earned the right to call myself a 'writer'.
That said, can I write? Am I any good at it?
I'm better at writing than I am at most other things, which isn't saying much, because I'm generally Not Very Good At Stuff. Writing always came naturally to me, and sometimes it feels as though I'm cheating my way through life, doing something this
easy for a living. Not that writing is easy, but it's a heck of a lot easier (from my perspective) than being a surgeon, or a pilot, or a teacher. Writing is about make-believe, and although writers have to do a lot of research, if we're ever stuck, we can just Make Something Up and get away with it. Mostly. If an architect did that, you'd have buildings falling apart. Bad writing doesn't kill anyone.
Still, though, am I good at it?
So far, most of what I've written hasn't been published or produced or even read by anyone else. My biggest writing job so far,
The Longest Journey, was extremely well received, but then again most games aren't particularly well written, so there was a lack of genuine competition. And my first (and only) novel,
Prophet Without Honour, was written as a tie-in novel for a computer game --
Anarchy Online -- and would have been published regardless of how good it actually was.
It's only natural for someone to be critical of his or her own work. As a writer, I've mostly been my own employer and editor. I believe in my own instincts, but I also know that I haven't had to fought a writer's battles. Not yet.
Am I good at what I do? At times; yes. I don't think I'm bad at it. I think I have a lot to learn. A
lot. But I also think that I will learn, and that my stories will improve and grow and develop. Some day soon, I won't be a wooden puppet anymore: I'll be a
real writer.
