A Writer's journey into game development

It is curious. I feel like reading somebody else, a familiar author I cant remember. Im quite happy with the result achieved by my translator and friend, Daisy, who also created, many years ago, the Elymuria name. I have completed the review of the first chapter, and expecting to have the whole process finished for Christmas, as a present to some special friends that are waiting for the book. So, stay tuned!

The actors that will cast the most important roles in Amazon´s The Wheel of Time have been announced. In case you are a modern reader and ignore what is it, Robert Jordan´s The Wheel of Time (finished by Brandon Sanderson) was in the 90s the novel every writer wanted to write. Like A Song of Ice and Fire is today. I hope you excuse my delay, but yesterday was a very busy day. So, here we go. Josha Stradowski will play Rand al'Thor. This is exactly the Rand I had imagined and period. If this guy can successfully portrait the darkness and burden of the character in the final stages of the plot, it will be perfect. Marcus Rutherford is Perrin Aybara. Same as Josha, Marcus is the Perrin I had in my mind. And also, Perrin is a character that faces hard decisions and has to change towards the end of the story, when faced with great responsabilities. Barney Harris will be Matrin Cauthon. Definitely I disagree here. Too much a pretty face. Mat is a gambler and a rogue, more charis...

This year I plan to write two novels. I already finished the first one, but Im not happy with the result, and neither are my zero readers and reviewers. It was an idea I had for a literary contest, but I didnt spent too much time improving it. So, it was too short and a few characters were not very well developed, which is not good if those characters are important in the novel plot. Currently Im working to improve it a bit. The second novel is advancing slowly, because I have time to finish it and I want to gather as much ideas as I can before I start to seriously work on it. Took me three months to finish the first book, I guess I can finish the second in 2-3 months, when I decide to devote all my time to it. Also, I decided to do something really crazy: asked a friend to do the english translation of my first novel. As you can see, my own english is far from good. It is a short book, which passed unnoticed when published, but now it is considered among the ten best fantasy novels i...

After reading most of the Sanderson books, I had this saga in the pending list. I hate reading in english and it is far from finished, which means there will be long wait periods between the publishing date of the books and its availability in spanish. Not gonna make a full review here, there are many out there and Sanderson doesn't needs it. If he would publish a book and tell no one, probably he would sell millions anyway. I just have to say that I sense something different here, it is more like reading Malazan Book of the Fallen stories: in the beginning you have no idea about what's going on. What the book doesn't lacks is the exuberant Sanderson's fantasy. The world is unique and very different, with all sorts of creatures and even some human tribes or races have bizarre features. Yet, it is not totally alien to the reader and you can easily assimilate the weird stuff. Definitely, China Miéville could learn a thing or two from these books. And so do I.

My books were mentioned in a conference about cuban fantasy writers last saturday. I knew about it because the author, Yoss, asked me the book covers, but yesterday an assistant confirmed me that Yoss referred to my novels in very good terms. Of course, that makes me very happy. But let's go to the important stuff. This week I solved a couple of little problems I had. One was dating back to my beginnings with unity and it was related to scroll areas. I need to implement a message area where usual game messages are displayed, and the capacity of scrolling the content was desirable. Well, at last I found a short explanation that helped me to solve this. Content Size Fitter was the answer. And yesterday I managed to implement a basic system to make transparent the objects between the player and the camera. Not too complex, it just requires a line cast from the camera to some point in the player (I recommend something near the head or so) and check what's hit. The you only ne...

First, I finished the draft of the novel. It is now on the hands (PCs, actually) of the zero readers. Then comes a process of polishing, leave to rest, and then polish again, which will produce the final version, which, in turn, will be handed to a second pair of eyes to hunt typing/grammatical errors. Violating this rule I imposed myself led to a book that was not as good as I expected in the previous novel.This means that I have some free time now to work on the next book. The not so good news is that the editor is not so interested in publishing it. They had a goal, and it was not exactly to make a success of every title in the catalog. As I'm not one of the most widely known authors, I haven't received any promotion, and neither has some good titles of the catalog, written by promissing cuban young authors. Back to semi-good news: the game demo is almost ready. I'm just trying to explore all the possibilities to host it in Google Play instead of somewhere else. I t...

In case you are proficient enough in spanish, or at least, enough to read, I remind you that I keep a blog in that language too. Also, I'm happy to announce that my  book is already available in Amazon . I put a lot of effort to make this my best book, and as usual, I ended up not quite sure about if I made it. Probably the next will be better.

A couple of days ago I received news about my friend Yoss: he is nominated to Phillip K. Dick award! I c&p from the official site: The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States during the previous calendar year. The award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust and the award ceremony is sponsored by the Northwest Science Fiction Society.  I wish him luck, but just being nominated is a great achievement (one more in his curriculum), for him and for cuban science fiction.

I have been reworking the game storyline, taking into consideration some ideas from a friend, who worked as second writer in the early stages of the project. I'm not happy at all with my current work. Although I set some important points in terms of plot twists and emotion, it lacks the required depth and fails to offer a living world, with several factions. I focused too much in providing choice, in the form of having a way to join one or another faction, instead of providing a couple of them that will be always unreachable, or simply opposed from the beginning. After all, a villain is always needed! And the storyline was too much a line . Too linear. Now I have to open the choices available to the player after the brief introductory quest. Of course, the final storyline should be tweaked by at least one more writer. An open world RPG is too big to be written by one man.

Same as December, January started with an offensive to my 5th novel. I'm very close to finishing it and not too soon, as the next ideas are pushing to get out. Perhaps my next book will play a bit with old style mystery novels and new weird, although I also have a more traditional fantasy plot in mind. Then I switched to programming for a couple of days. The prototype received some interesting features like working conditionals in dialog branches, my very own AI/sensory system and trading. The base for the quest system is already there, but may require lot of work to be functional. Currently, the protoype is just a lot of subsystems, like a workbench where I test ideas. It wasn't supposed to be, but my previous project had too many issues to be corrected and I discarded it. The work I'm doing is aimed to improve a couple of details, and presenting a video in a conference about game development next saturday. Maybe I will share it here too.

My friend Victor Hugo (who is a writer, but not the old french writer), brought to my attention this phrase during the interview I made him. Attributed to Pliny the Elder, it means "no day without a line", and it is now my slogan. As I have mentioned before, creating a discipline is essential to become a writer. It can be a mere 300 words, a couple of lines, or simply fixing something.  Doesn't matters the amount, whatever you do brings you closer to your final goal. If you find yourself some day without ideas, perhaps you should try planning ahead the structure of your novel. And of course, taking 2-3 days for resting and letting your ideas to settle  is not totally forbidden.

Orbita Juracán , an anthology of cuban science fiction writers is available on Amazon, and Im happy to say that Im among the authors included. The book features a dream team of writers, from great clasics like Daina Chaviano, Yoss and Bruno Enríquez, to more recent and young authors (Im recent, but not young). In case you can read spanish, I strongly advice you get this book. Haven't got my copy yet, but Im sure that the selected stories are of exceptional quality.

John Scalzi (author of some great science fiction books, and Hugo winner) has an interesting article about long books and productivity , that I strongly recommend. Pay attention to the comparison in the end, between Scalzi and Moore, and between Scalzi and Martin, in terms of word count. I use to write a few hundred words daily (almost every day, really), reaching 1000 some days. So far, my books range between 45 thousand and 62 thousand words, enough to be considered novels, but too much for most literary competitions, which set the limits around 40k words or 120 pages. I tend to go straight to the action and avoid excessive introspection or ramblings, which usually are up to a 40% of long books text. My friend Yoss says I have a good synthesis capability. To write 100.000 words, a small percent of Jerusalem , and much more than my current average, supposing I had the plot to justify that, I would have to work for about seven months. Which, I think, is not that bad, considering t...

I have been following my own advices and I'm glad to say that the fourth novel is reaching the final stage. I'm surprised! Of course, finishing is not the end, after that comes a log process of review and polish. As usual, I have fell short of the initial estimate of page count. Very short. This will require some work to introduce more action in the plot, without affecting the rhythm of the story. Also, I have started to work on detailing the game story a bit more. Got some little help from a friend on this, but after some quick review I noticed that we really don't have an story, just a few random events. No open world, no plot twists, no substance. So, I have to go back to step one: proper planning. It is a big world, so, it will be a large work. Also I have  to program sometimes, which means I'm doing three tasks at same time (I'm better than iOS!). Again, I'm surprised of how well Im handling this. The trick consists in prioritizing tasks according to ...

Here are a couple of free advices for you: get discipline and motivation. I have been working lately to finish my fourth novel before the end of the year, and polishing the last details in the third before august. Without taking too much time from programming. Obviously, I haven't had too much success on the later. But at least, I have confirmed something: discipline is crucial, and also is motivation and some previous planning. Before starting the fourth novel book, I tried to put together some basic structure, a few lines describing what happens. In the end, it proved to be insufficient, but also the correct way to avoid getting stucked too often. It didnt avoided long periods of not writing at all, but the solution for this was to find the right motivator. In my case, I try to channel all daily experiences good or bad, to my "fuel tank". Specially the bad ones, and I have a large supply of those lately. So, I have been able to keep working daily, duplicating my ...

Even when I have the freedom to decide what kind of weapons are we going to have in the future described in the story of our next game, I wanted to make a little research. After all, 40 years are not so many years, yet they are enough to ensure that technology will change, I thought. In a world were nanotechnology and graphene will rule, military tech has to be different. Well, seems that our future military tech is not going to be so future. Maybe it is classified information, but seems that besides using polymers for cases, we wont be seeing many changes in the next decades. Ammo technology havent been changing a lot lately. Even next gen stuff like flechettes and caseless ammunition is not so next gen, and has been extensively tested and its weaknesses proven, and discarded. Thats the reason why they are not ben used on the battlefield. The real next step: energy beam weapons, are still far from our reach. To achieve lethal results, the laser must focus the target for a long time...

Well, almost a month now since I published my first novel on Amazon KDP to see what happens. And the result: nothing happened, as expected. Lack of promotion, mostly. We, readers, tend to be some sort of weird people. We want to find more books, yet we avoid the danger of unknown authors. For a reader to accept a book, it must be recommended by another reader, or by some big publisher marketing campaign. That means somebody risked his/her time before you to read the book, and considers it worth reading. As I havent gathered a large number of readers on internet (all my good reviews come from locals), I have sold just a few copies. Definitely, Im not going to become famous this way. So, my advice to new writers is, above all, to find a few good spots to promote your ebook. Specially, try to attract your friends (regrettably, mine bought the printed copy and cant review my ebook on Amazon). Get some cover, if it does not has an illustration, at least make it different from Amazon...

Not too much programming lately. I have spent some time finishing my third novel, fixing the text I received from my first printed book, and planning/starting my fourth novel. The second one has proven to be a boring and long task. The problem is that according to my editor, the publisher doesnt deliver the corrected text, design, etc, to the author. After insisting, I got a weird formatted PDF with the text and the illustration markers. Converting the PDF to an editable format was almost impossible, and the final result was an ugly mess. Also, it took about 12 mb when saved as doc. The solution? Copy and paste as plain text, save again, and then reapply styles, fix lot of splitted words (in spanish, books are justified and cut words in the page edge).  I decided to finish third novel, so I could spend start working on the fourth as soon as possible. An advice to novice writers: you learn to write by writing. Through the first three novels, I have learned a few things about cr...

Tery Prathcett, creator of Discworld, died today. I  have no words to express my feelings.

Forgot to mention that my book is already available in the stores, but only in Havana. According to Yoss, some members of the literary workshop already bought it and the opinions are good, which I consider an achievement because they are a very demanding public, used to read good fantasy and sci-fi. Also is worth mentioning that they are published and awarded writers and they are not shy if the text deserves critics. I hope to talk more with them in the book fair, next month, and perhaps discuss with the publishers my next novel. And the payment, which seems to be delayed because the publisher has no money.  In the meantime, Im enjoying my new condition of published author.