At the risk of disembowelment, defenestration, quartering, incineration, salting and irradiation for even bringing this up, my suggestion is this:
You can do it all, by yourself, with a level of expediency that will in no way sap the quality. Remember all those hilarious and oddly productive (and necessary) interactions with The Computer in Paranoia?
Well, brush of those clever, patient communication skills and start to explain one of your products to Friend Computer. Feed it all of your already finished text. Explain what you need in order to have the publication ready to go.
Ask it for a strategic checklist for next steps and a process for completion. Ask it for suggestions, for artwork. Ask it to take your text descriptions of maps for ideas of useable maps.
React to Computer with challenging questions. Point out how badly it has gotten things, how artificial, how false. Be explicit. Then review its response. Refine the next strategy, checklist and content until it is closer to what you need.
It may not cross the goal line, but it will break the log jam, it will regain your momentum. It is how I code now, and it hasn't made me dumber. Game Design is specialized form of coding.
AI assistance is a terrible weapon when used incorrectly, but when implemented with some modicum of wisdom, restraint and utilitarian ruthlessness, it is the sword that cut the Gordian Knot.
A Thousand Suns is not using your considerable strength as a writer, but your less-beloved skill as an editor. 90% of that work is changing your natural voice in those areas where your natural voice is not useful to your consumer. That's not fun game design. It is the ideal work for editorial assistance from AI. You can show the AI an example of the previous edition and then your revised edited version, then give it the rest of the unedited portion and ask AI to clean it up in much the same way, and give you back a redline version.
Then you shift from editor to reader - trading a lesser, boring strength for one of your greater, exciting strengths! (or more technically, from copyeditor to line-editor) You don't have to accept any of the suggested changes, but if you accept even half of them, you could potentially have the text revisions of A Thousands Suns done by the end of the month.
Based on a similar situation I had last year, I'd guess that it would reduce your personal time to finish the project from 50 hours to maybe 8, with about an hour of direct interaction with the AI agent. It is closer to using a spellchecker than asking HAL for help.
Find a publisher who will give you a good deal on royalties and a lot of creative control. I'd guess there are plenty of guys who would love to publish your stuff, bz you have tons of name recognition. They could make a lot of the decisions that are freezing you and just keep you in the loop.
That's a good idea, but here's what I personally would worry about (with experience) if it were me:
1) Every respectable and decent publisher, will, as a matter of business, want anywhere from small-to-large creative control or at least input.
2) Any royalty-paying publisher is going to make a disproportionate amount of the income, limiting my ability to fund the next project. Even if the rare one does not, earning royalties over time creates a serious cashflow problem, and a diminishing one at that. I'd be in better financial shape if I just limited the scope of a project, self-published that, and cleared 50%-90% of the profits directly from my readers, regardless of the platform.
3) The decisions that freeze me up are typically decisions I do not want others making for me.
4) Structured deadlines for personal projects don't end well for me. I'm fine with normal "work" deadlines, but when I'm working on a passion project, I will make my business partner miserable with walls of text content, walls of text excuses for why the deadline needs pushed, walls of text apologies for the financial risk and harm the partner is suffering. In short, on a creative, passionate thing (again, I work in data, so this doesn't even creep in a little at my real job), even if it is one I'm relying on financially, this factor adds complexity and delay, it doesn't help it.
5) Finally, out of pure selfish arrogance, I admit, I do not ever want to get a deal - good or bad - from a third party on the publication of my own work.
Again, these are my personal issues illustrating my ability to follow your advice, not arguments against it. Far more successful people than me would happily follow that advice.
Don't use AI, because you then have to identify it as AI-assisted, which then cuts your potential income stream by half, because most people want nothing to do with gratuitous AI slop. Be a punk. Do it yourself. I have published 8 books and countless magazine articles now for both Advanced Fighting Fantasy and Dragon Warriors, and for most of them I have done all the writing, several edits, layouts, design (easy, because its 80s-90s retro-kitsch), maps, diagrams, some art (when not working with a cool cadre of talented artists I've discovered on social media), art direction, and so on, before the final product then gets proofread and published). No one will do it for you, unless you pay them, so otherwise just do it yourself; you'll learn new skills and become a better content creator, all without AI slop slowly corrupting and degrading your cognitive processes not to mention destroying the environment at the same time. Be a punk: DIY. :-)
This article may help:
ReplyDeletehttps://theproductiveengineer.net/hardest-or-easiest-work-first-what-the-research-shows/
At the risk of disembowelment, defenestration, quartering, incineration, salting and irradiation for even bringing this up, my suggestion is this:
ReplyDeleteYou can do it all, by yourself, with a level of expediency that will in no way sap the quality. Remember all those hilarious and oddly productive (and necessary) interactions with The Computer in Paranoia?
Well, brush of those clever, patient communication skills and start to explain one of your products to Friend Computer. Feed it all of your already finished text. Explain what you need in order to have the publication ready to go.
Ask it for a strategic checklist for next steps and a process for completion. Ask it for suggestions, for artwork. Ask it to take your text descriptions of maps for ideas of useable maps.
React to Computer with challenging questions. Point out how badly it has gotten things, how artificial, how false. Be explicit. Then review its response. Refine the next strategy, checklist and content until it is closer to what you need.
It may not cross the goal line, but it will break the log jam, it will regain your momentum. It is how I code now, and it hasn't made me dumber. Game Design is specialized form of coding.
AI assistance is a terrible weapon when used incorrectly, but when implemented with some modicum of wisdom, restraint and utilitarian ruthlessness, it is the sword that cut the Gordian Knot.
A Thousand Suns is not using your considerable strength as a writer, but your less-beloved skill as an editor. 90% of that work is changing your natural voice in those areas where your natural voice is not useful to your consumer. That's not fun game design. It is the ideal work for editorial assistance from AI. You can show the AI an example of the previous edition and then your revised edited version, then give it the rest of the unedited portion and ask AI to clean it up in much the same way, and give you back a redline version.
ReplyDeleteThen you shift from editor to reader - trading a lesser, boring strength for one of your greater, exciting strengths! (or more technically, from copyeditor to line-editor) You don't have to accept any of the suggested changes, but if you accept even half of them, you could potentially have the text revisions of A Thousands Suns done by the end of the month.
Based on a similar situation I had last year, I'd guess that it would reduce your personal time to finish the project from 50 hours to maybe 8, with about an hour of direct interaction with the AI agent. It is closer to using a spellchecker than asking HAL for help.
Find a publisher who will give you a good deal on royalties and a lot of creative control. I'd guess there are plenty of guys who would love to publish your stuff, bz you have tons of name recognition. They could make a lot of the decisions that are freezing you and just keep you in the loop.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good idea, but here's what I personally would worry about (with experience) if it were me:
Delete1) Every respectable and decent publisher, will, as a matter of business, want anywhere from small-to-large creative control or at least input.
2) Any royalty-paying publisher is going to make a disproportionate amount of the income, limiting my ability to fund the next project. Even if the rare one does not, earning royalties over time creates a serious cashflow problem, and a diminishing one at that. I'd be in better financial shape if I just limited the scope of a project, self-published that, and cleared 50%-90% of the profits directly from my readers, regardless of the platform.
3) The decisions that freeze me up are typically decisions I do not want others making for me.
4) Structured deadlines for personal projects don't end well for me. I'm fine with normal "work" deadlines, but when I'm working on a passion project, I will make my business partner miserable with walls of text content, walls of text excuses for why the deadline needs pushed, walls of text apologies for the financial risk and harm the partner is suffering. In short, on a creative, passionate thing (again, I work in data, so this doesn't even creep in a little at my real job), even if it is one I'm relying on financially, this factor adds complexity and delay, it doesn't help it.
5) Finally, out of pure selfish arrogance, I admit, I do not ever want to get a deal - good or bad - from a third party on the publication of my own work.
Again, these are my personal issues illustrating my ability to follow your advice, not arguments against it. Far more successful people than me would happily follow that advice.
Don't use AI, because you then have to identify it as AI-assisted, which then cuts your potential income stream by half, because most people want nothing to do with gratuitous AI slop. Be a punk. Do it yourself. I have published 8 books and countless magazine articles now for both Advanced Fighting Fantasy and Dragon Warriors, and for most of them I have done all the writing, several edits, layouts, design (easy, because its 80s-90s retro-kitsch), maps, diagrams, some art (when not working with a cool cadre of talented artists I've discovered on social media), art direction, and so on, before the final product then gets proofread and published). No one will do it for you, unless you pay them, so otherwise just do it yourself; you'll learn new skills and become a better content creator, all without AI slop slowly corrupting and degrading your cognitive processes not to mention destroying the environment at the same time. Be a punk: DIY. :-)
ReplyDelete