Time is just pouring through my hands like sand or water, but there is no reason to feel bad about it anymore. I have accepted that this is how things go. They call that transience, the experience of time fleeting and all things changing around you. I felt like I was a stagnating solid block in the middle of that many times, I could not take part, but this is not true. If really everything is passing and changing, so are you.

I have been changing a lot lately. Enough that even I noticed it. Last week I learned the basics of UI design. This does not make me an UI expert, but increasing the knowledge from zero to making a sheet of box designs the client likes and approves of is a huge step. And what I learned about learning was even better and bigger. I want to share with you!

Do you have something that you would kind of need in your skillset, but it’s boring to learn, all the explanations are difficult to understand or hopelessly convoluted or you just don’t get a grip on ressources about it or the time or energy to study them at all?

What makes you think you are best served with huge chunks of your time put into these things? Could you be thinking you want to bridge the gap of being bad at something fast? It is pain, agony, to imagine you are really bad at something and despite best efforts will be bad at it for years. Yeah. But if you build the bridge too fast and not stable enough it will collapse again and you will have hurt yourself, too. All the sacrifices you made to rush it did not bring you the desired results and you have still spent the ressources. So I sat down, I had to learn UI design and deliver a first basic sheet within a week, and the first two days nothing gave. I insisted to learn at a speed at which I could observe myself so I clearly could see what the problem was. Anyone can watch tutorials on UI for an hour. But do you know more about how to tackle the concrete UI tasks you have to solve afterwards? Do you know what to do at all? How to translate it into your own work? Day two I still learned more about what UI is but the fog was strong and heavy as before in my head. In my impatient head this should have been a catastrophy. Two solid days of spending tedious time on something without a result. Outrageous. Indeed, one hour of researching UI made me tired like having spent three hours or so on it. I learned that time spent on activities is not equal. Activities are not consuming energy equally. I accepted that and told myself, fine, then I will have to spend more days where I “just” learn a bit UI and do not expect to rush to design it when the head stays empty. But on the third day my brain gave in and I designed what I was told to design without a problem. I could have terribly fought with myself Monday and Tuesday, spent a lot of energy on being angry with myself or my learning speed. I could have tried to force myself to be more productive without knowing what I was actually doing. Instead for once I just accepted what I found to be and happen in reality and worked with that. No expectations. How could I expect a certain rate of progress from myself in a field I did not even know what to expect and how fast? Think about it, if you are new at something…how do you know you are too slow? You have no experience to back up how fast or slow things should be. That comes with time when you have finished the task several times and have developed a routine with it. Also you are not that other person that did it in half or double your time.

So Monday and Tuesday I did what I could, spend the time on UI my brain would give, then spent the other time and focus on tasks that cost me less and got those done, too. Wednesday it clicked for UI and I was able to do the design task in actually an average time for my design and drawing sessions. It had clicked. My brain had needed time to establish all the connections. I also had to rethink what UI is for me and how I place and value it in the process of videogame creation. Turns out UI is actually more important than the actual game art. What do I mean? The user interface the player sees and interacts with shapes the gaming experience. You have no experience without the user interface, even if it is a minimal one! How do you even start the game? Game art of course is important, too, but art itself is not interactive if you think about it. You could also be watching a movie if it was not for menus, choices, health bars and visible consequences of actions in the world. And from there, from this Wednesday, learning more UI was easier. I had completed the task once so every sheet that follows, every research that follows for a different subtask or design element is easier or faster or both.

And I’m sure this works for other fields, too! I am learning about business in little daily steps. And the upcoming weeks in particular I might invest some time into chipping away at perspective. I don’t accept not being able to use this art fundamental at it’s full force. I want to be at least so okay at it that I do not fail at problem solving. Perspective is important for viewing things, you know. My camera angles and such. And this is where we come back to Street Prey (SPREY).

Everything I’m doing, the whole design course, the contract job that has nothing to do with it but pays and opens possibilities for more paid work in the future …everything is for SPREY and my personal work in general. The better I get, the better I can express myself and deliver best quality to my audience. Apparently you do not always work in straight lines towards that. I’m on a neighboring slope or so right now looking over. One day things will go together. SPREY will either finance itself or I will have enough paid work to finance the time spent on it. I am working hard and doing my best every day. New is that I also accept days that just are not my best. I do not ever regret times I spend relaxing. Having a balance between that and work makes me happier and more productive than trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

I am longing for SPREY though, terribly. The daily draw and upload scheme is unfortunately not possible for me right now, but I will spend this week collecting things and try out the upload it all on Sunday scheme. I will not yet scream it from the rooftops and advertise it everywhere on my social media because this is untested. What if I can’t make it work and have to cease and look for a different approach within 1-2 weeks? It would disappoint readers again if they learn about a weekly scheme and then it doesn’t happen. So let’s test first. This is the privilege of the beginner. Test as much as you want. You have nothing to lose.

See you next blog entry!