Secrets, Novella, and Nutella

Hello!
Unlike the usual trend of musings and teasings, today I'm simply going to talk about what I've been doing. While, yes, it is a tease, it is not entirely a tease on game development, something which I think I talk about for the majority of my time on here. So today I'm going to talk about art, writing, UI programming, and film.

Art
In my art class I just finished a surrealistic painting. Is it good? I don't know! But one thing is for sure: I need a ton more experience with acrylic paint before I'll be able to satisfy my personal expectations. I also need to work on my steadiness with a brush-- It's something I'm not used to using, so I tend to get pretty shaky with it sometimes.

I've also been working on my digital art skills for video games. Sure, I've done legions of sketches and stills, but it wasn't until recently that I've gotten interested in drawing/"painting" my game art rather than using low-res pixel-based art. I think it will propel the visual aspect of my games to new heights. And while, yes, I do have a certain love for pixel art and also for low-res art, it does not fit in with the kinds of games I'm looking to make. Also, I'd rather not do pixel art just for nostalgia's sake. And finally, aside from all that, it's been very refreshing and fun doing hand drawn game art! I'm enjoying it a ton.

Writing
I've begun writing a short novel in the spirit of NaNoWriMo. I missed the actual event, so I'm just doing this for the sake of it. I think pushing myself to write a 50,000 word novel in a month will seriously propel my storytelling skills. I'm just over a week in and I'm already building technique like crazy. I can't guarantee the novel will be any good, but it will exist. So far it's relatively cohesive, but we'll see if that changes. Once I'm done I'll be putting it up at my site for download.

UI Programming
Macs are awesome to write UI with. My nuances with Xcode aside, I've found designing and programming UI with Cocoa to be a pleasurable experience. Some things, like populating a table, require somewhat crazy amounts of effort in the eye of a beginner like me, but now that I've learned how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together I'm finding it to be a very effective and well thought-out model with lots of flexibility. My current project is a UI level editor for a secret game project I have an idea for. I'm making it both for the learning experience and for it's application, because I can see this game as being one that requires a ton of level design. If the level editor comes out any good I'll open-source it for all you peoples. I'm going to try to make it as user-friendly and efficiently coded as possible. *ahem* Let's see how well that works out.

Film
I'm beginning work on a short series called "Zombie Fast Food"(name may change). You may or may nor recall me making a trailer for this series earlier this year. Yes, well, so far they're related in name only. There is zombies, food, and survivors though, I assure you. This project is being done for my film class at school. The main goal with this series is to gain experience in a wide and balanced variety of film making elements and to use my surrounding resources well. Visual storytelling, cinematography, post-production, pre-production, makeup, etc. There are lots of run-down and rickety buildings amidst a forest-like setting here, so I thought that would work perfectly for a somewhat-cliche zombie movie. It breaks off from the zombie movie cliche in that it's not really a horror or action movie, per se, it's more of a drama. We'll see how this goes.


Anyway, that's all for now! I'll post results as soon as things materialize.

Wondering how Nutella got in the title? Keep wondering.