I found myself in a quite surprising situation the past week.
The week I declared to be my relaxation and restructuring week became the week my husband and I released our first videogame, „Your Land“ and I prepared and opened my first digital solo art show in that same digital space.
Your Land Release
I‘d carefully say both my husband and I are rather daydreamy creative types, although I clearly and sadly beat him in anxiety by miles. So it might seem like a miracle we actually finished the game. We have been working on it since a year and as it‘s our first game, so the development cycle was rather shaky and a sandbox fantasy RPG probably too big for a team of originally two people. But luckily for us we met a lot of great people along on the way who in one way or the other contributed to „Your Land“ while we grew and learned. We hope that we in turn could either contribute to their visions, too, or at least give the best game back that we could make at the moment. Also, I am very grateful for the small but creative community that has formed around „Your Land“ already. They help to shape the world more than in a classical development model. In the classical model there is a clear distinction between devs and players and devs throw content out and get feedback in return. In „Your Land“ everyone can contribute content, build own places within the world or otherwise get involved while we as head developers oversee the creative vision and consistency and provide the framework of a game lore and a general direction in which the world is heading. My husband loves interactivity even more than me. In his ideal vision the players write the world‘s further history all by their actions. The future will show whether we can achieve that.
Manul Art Show
And the art show? Oh, the art show. I can best describe it as a tale of blind passion and redemption that absolutely does not show in the end result. That is nothing special if you think about it. Every piece of art tells a story in itself and there is a whole different story of how the artwork got made. So the creation of an exhibition as an art event in itself can have a story of itself, too. I had nightmares about middle school and my dreamy forgetfulness that tends to bring me into trouble sometimes. But it‘s just a price I have to pay for an otherwise very creative brain. My nightmares circled around past failures. Of course they would do that in an important launch week and when I would work on an art show, something that I know as a big source of disappointment. But still powered up from the completed 100 days challenge I just accepted what I felt, the past, and let it not influence my work in any way. I just pushed through scaling down and editing some of the best of my manul pictures to exhibit them on 128pixel squares in „Your Land“. It is funny how my experiences from real world art shows translated into that. Yes, we even had to prepare the ingame digital space and make sure interested visitors would find the exhibition rooms, had snacks available and would not get lost in the other parts of the exhibition site, an airship airport. I met several versions of past me while working through the pieces, a lot of past confusion that luckily got resolved. I was very content but also very tired, when everything was finished. And I‘m working on a manul zine with at least two volumes to bring this project to a final conclusion.
Also, I was very lucky. A streamer was present at the grand opening and later uploaded a clip of his adventure at the Manul Exhibition. You can see it through his eyes here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0OkYfSkMEc
And was it good?
The release of „Your Land“ was a huge success for our means and set a new record of 10+ players being online on the server at the same time. There was only one small bug and that got identified and fixed by my husband in what felt like under two minutes. He, the experienced coder of us, said himself the launch went almost too good. A couple more plots in the digital city of Haven were claimed, new houses in the merchant area were and are getting built, filling „Your Land“ with more life. The opening of my art show was a modest success. I cannot pour my life story and all background stories of the manul drawings onto the viewers, so I practised myself in smaller talk than that. And the visitors seemed to be entertained by the manuls, too. I could not ask for anything more and am also grateful that this simple, small event probably helped me to get over past wounds and made thus made me a better artist again. The world of anxiety is boundless and has no solid floor( that is the beauty of it, isn‘t it?), but I feel like I‘m standing on solid floor right now. So if I could do the 100 days challenge, and I could do that, too, what else can I do? The future will show.
