Continuing to work on that Tinselfly scene. In fact, I’ve done little else in my free time lately.

Right before bed on Sunday, I was working on this light-up sign. And for just a fraction of a second, I thought it was real, spinning silently above me on that late summer night as the crickets chirped and leaves rustled around me.

The weekend was ending. Shops were closing and the city was strangely quiet. It was time to go home.

It was kind of unsettling.

* * *

Given how long all this has been in development, you’d think that I’d be overjoyed to be able to see this stuff on screen at long last; to be able to walk through these sets that previously existed only in my head. Like how you might want to see a well-realized version of your favorite book, with all the sets and costumes and everything just the way you imagined them.

And… that’s completely not how I’ve been reacting to it. Which is kinda surprising me.

I guess you could say that getting this stuff out of my head makes it more malleable; an idea is hard to react to. Once something’s up there on screen, I’m more willing to change its purpose, appearance, or cut it and related objects entirely. Initially, my city here was supposed to be half a kilometer in diameter; now, it’s down to half that, reducing the area over which the player can travel to a quarter of what it originally was supposed to be. And the scope of the project in general has gotten significantly smaller.

Now that I can see this, I am so much more willing to produce work that I find merely adequate and make cuts to all areas of the project.

It’s kind of liberating.

For the most part, this place does not feel any more real to me than it did before I started modeling it. It is, however, significantly easier to work with. And that’s what’s important right now. Feeling real can happen later.