A slow day today as I move between projects. I crated new sounds and backing tracks for the next Fall in Green performance in Winsford. This is the first time I'll be using only the Reface DX, so all of the arrangements will be different. I so wish that this potentially great synthesizer had more than 32 presets! It could rival the Microkorg in popularity and utility, but Yamaha seems to have designed it as a studio toy not a serious instrument. I've said this before. It's tragic.
I've recorded a few guitar parts for my songs in progress too, unhappy with all of them, and spent too long on programming diversions. I watched a first review/walkthrough of Gunstorm and it made me think that I need to add a few changes. Firstly, the controller isn't supported from the outset, you have to customise the controls one at a time. I thought about simply adding fixed controller support, BUT this would interfere with any custom controls... I could simply remove custom controls (or make those keyboard only), but I can't imagine anyone playing with keyboard anyway, and the game is fundamentally designed for mouse and I expect that everyone would eventually use the mouse. Secondly, the reviewer complained about a lack of tutorials or instructions (there is a manual of course, I seem to be the only person who reads manuals). This makes more sense as a future feature.
Finally, I printed out all of the Flatpace IIk ships in an effort to standardise ship design rules (amazingly, I've never had a full list of these before), but the task seems so huge that I feel overwhelmed and uncertain by all of it.
At the moment, ships have a 'look' and size number and just about any component that will fit in that number is permitted to attach to the ship. In other words, the physical size of the ship isn't an issue, so a tiny ship can happily have a huge gun or generator. I wondered if new design rules would tie the shape of the ship with the items, so when swapping weapons the shape of the ship itself may change. A new big generator may bolt on a big box to the ship.
I'm thinking that I might be wasting days and weeks of thought about this. The plan seems to be growing more complex when my aim was greater simplicity. My thoughts are also darting towards the maze game idea too.
Reading The Face of Violence is fascinating. It makes that case that the two fundamental drives in a person are to integrate socially to make progress in the world, and to prove individuality and rebel against that society. Those who crave independence still need society as society gives us everything. If we are alone, independent, we are not needed, and being needed is an essential trait for survival (if we're not needed we may as well be dead, who would notice?), yet to conform totally is to cease to be individual, to become a proverbial cog in a machine, therefore replaceable, in which case our life is equally pointless. We exist in the gap between these extremes, treading the border between being needed but replaceable by someone with the same skills, and being independent but alone and thus not needed by others. The size of our social group perhaps determines our position on that always uncomfortable scale.
In this age of social media, our social groups are unnaturally large, as big as the world to some extent, so most people are in the 'replaceable' camp, but surrounded by social forces that control and repress our behaviour which is frustrating, but there is no natural outlet for that frustration, so it manifests itself in strange behaviours that are essentially solitary and personal: gender issues, social anxieties, eating disorders, hyperactive disorders. The rise in these personal disorders is directly caused by social media, by a mass-media of which most of society takes part. We are no longer 'famous for fifteen minutes', but on stage before an audience all day every day, and those on this stage are inevitably driven crazy by it.
