Typical rant journal entry.
I'm getting through another productivity crysis, mainly because I'm working mostly alone, and I've got some university related motivation issues...
First, boring life-related stuff:
Maybe it's because the speciality I've chosen - English Philology, aiming for master title and title of certified translator for the court (former is the requirement). I'm probably the only person that is not there because that language is my passion, and not because I failed to qualify for other unis like about 25% percent of people here as well (I actually had about 350 recruitment points for another uni, where I could study forestry, only 115 were required, they sent a few letters after me two weeks ago...), but rather because of a specific set of plans I have.
I feel that this choice was a step backwards, taking into consideration that I graduated a technical school (getting highest score on finals there and most likely scoring very high in comparison with other schools in this region), always preferred practical and technical classes, and sciences, especially biology. Whereas here I have to learn all those boring little details, like several ways to pronounce one vowel, historical detail and such (and while I was learning those fast and forgetting them even faster, I never really enjoyed them).
Another thing that's gnawing one me - do I need college when I graduated the school with technician title and with several qualification courses done - all of those in fields that have (always had, and most likely will have for a long time) a demand for workforce, pay nicely and are in fact enjoyable? I find a prospect of specialistic flights for let's say, a power plant, to monitor state of wind turbines or high voltage lines, or seeking out people with thermovision cameras for emergency services, or commercial flights for TV stations and private endeavours (I can do both types of flights right off the bat) much more interesting than teaching or sitting for hours by a desk to translate a few pages of text, and that's just about only one of possibilities. I know that finding a job is not an easy task nowadays, but I'm one of those fuckers that have the balls to freelance, run their own business and take up a few odd jobs in between.
For short, I have a lot of different plans, career prospects and even more doubts, to the point that what I'm doing right now feels not pointless, but maybe unnecessary and a bit painful.
Now to the point:
I highly prefer to work alone on any projects I have, but it just doesn't work. Not because of troubles with creating assets, maps, code or script (I'm a jack of all trades...), but because no one is going to kick me in balls when I'm procrastinating for too long...
Some time ago, I had a short collaboration with Windawz, who was meant to take a role of lead level designer for my current project. And while it ended without anything actually done on the level side - I created base assets and scripted gameplay framework (that is now available as SE2DevBase) in a very short time. All I needed to do it was simply a mention that a few assets were needed in a message from him.
Teamwork seems to be a huge motivating factor for me when working on larger scale projects, so I decided that I'll form a team of modders willing to contribute to the project, in a forum thread that I'll post soon.
Anyone that read that wall of text, have a cookie:
Really man, I'm sorry I couldn't help.
I wish you good luck with your project.
Seriously, your request for simple torch flame particles made me learn the whole particle system, create new particles, and then create whole game logic for levels. All of this in three days (SE2DevBase came much later, cause I've only recently got the idea to publish a dev base).
You still can work with me, and under much less rigid conditions, just like anyone else.
Motivation/procrastination is another big issue floating around nowadays. I'm going to be honest and admit that the reason I'm wasnt mapping for urby's collab was because I was playing tf2. What a terrible decision.
With college, I've got an abundance of free time - some days classes are ending early, downtime between lectures and/or classes, no need to study too hard. I have a lot of time for about anything, and yet I'm not even trying. Looking back, it's curious how I was much more productive when I was working my ass off for most of the day. Not only I had satisfaction for a job well done, but also I felt a strong urge to spend time on any of my projects - I wanted to spend any amount of time I had left before end of the day on my passions.
Lately I'm more like instead of letting some steam off and doing something, I let my creativity rot in procrastination.