Well, well, well. Another meta prompt, and another meta post. As I've mentioned before, I do love a good post about writing/worldbuilding as a hobby itself, and when @killerwot tagged me in his post about art and creativity, I promised myself I would try and talk about this as well.
Original image is from our hospital stay while my eldest child was being born, but it felt like a fitting header image!
The original prompt is an Ecency prompt by @mypathtofire, which you can find here, and I encourage you to do so as it's a super fun prompt with a lot of talking-point ideas to guide your post.
My creative works
If you've been around my blog before you'll already know this, but for those who haven't... I have a few creative hobbies. Primarily on-chain I focus on Worldbuilding, writing, and some art - typically fantasy cartography and dungeon-mapping. I also run the @worldbuilder account and our Worldbuilding community, so I put out daily(ish) prompts to get folks writing and worldbuilding.
I also count a lot of my personal programming works as creative - as I generally develop writing, worldbuilding, and tabletop rpg aides like my HazeGaming NPC Generator, which spits out a bunch of characteristics for various D&D NPCs. (Though, I have very successfully used the generator for non-D&D stuff as well)
On top of that, I do a bit of recorded gaming and I'm going to count producing videos for YouTube as a creative pursuit, as it's inadvertently taught me a great deal about video editing and production, and the tools and habits surrounding what it takes to make it producing video content. This isn't something I'm super keen on, so I'm quite sure I'll never "make it big" on Youtube... but it's enjoyable and I learn new things so I keep doing it. Plus, sometimes my videos help folks and that's super cool.
Why Create?
I'm going to slightly change this question to be "why create (on HIVE)", since I think that for most humans around the world, creating something is just part of the human condition. Everyone has some kind of creative outlet. Some folks build terrariums, some folks rebuild old cars, some do art, make music... you get the picture. Nearly everyone creates something.
But, why do I do it here? Well, I think blogging about my creative pursuits creates a bit of an Ouroboros - It generates a feedback loop that reinforces creating even more stuff. If I was doing this by myself just for me and the small group of folks I know that would play in my tabletop games or read my works, I'd be less inspired to keep going. I can see nearly daily the inspiration my Worldbuilding prompts generate for other people, and I can read the neat thoughts and feedback on my own stories, posts, and videos... and that is a powerful motivator to not just keep going, but also to do more.
I'd be making almost all of this content no matter what, but being on Hive and having this community has prompted me to both branch out and try new things, and to focus even more on some topics and really dive into them. So, as far as the question of "Why did[do] you decide to create it?", I don't really know. Partly, I create because I think other folks might find it interesting, useful, or inspirational. I also do it because I've found as I've aged that being able to look back at what I was doing 10 years ago is a great way to quantify my own growth... and, I create because if I don't create things I get in a bad headspace. I have to make things, it's just part of who I am.
What do you like about it?
Broadly, I like everything about being creative, but if I were to focus my answer a bit... I like learning and growing. The more I draw maps, the better I get at drawing and the more I figure out about how to achieve neat styles and stuff like that. The more I create fictional worlds, the better I am at asking what a small change might do to a plot (and, also, how plots in traditional media are influenced BY the setting's worldbuilding). The more I write, blog, and produce videos, the better I get at those things.
I love being able to look back at work I did a year ago, or two years ago, or five years ago and say "holy *@&^ look at how much I've improved since then!". I do the same with programming - so many of my hobbies are very incremental, slow growth (much like my Hive stake and journey!) but when I zoom out and look at my progress in the time I've been tracking it, I find that I've actually learned a lot more about my hobbies than I thought I did in that time. And, often, I'll find I've learned more about things that touch on my hobbies.
For example, because of worldbuilding for tabletop rpgs, I dove into the world of Solo TTRPG games... and because of that I rubbed shoulders with indie game designers, and because of that, I have two projects currently on the go that will break me into the indie-ttrpg scene. First as an expansion to an existing product, and second as a completely new (or changed) game due to an overhauled set of mechanics based on a game I love. I know more about ttrpg game development directly because of my interest in Worldbuilding... and because of my interest in ttrpg game-dev, I know more about Creative Commons licensing and so many other things.
Which is a really long way to reinforce what I already said: I love learning, and it's honestly surprising how much a person can indirectly learn because of a hobby they take on.
How did you produce it?
For my artwork, I use both traditional pen-and-paper cartography tools, as well as a Galaxy S6 Lite tablet that I've grown to love.
For my videogame content, I record with OBS (which, let me tell you, has been a lot of trial and error!), and I use DaVinci Resolve when I need to do editing.
For my writing/worldbuilding, I've been doing fictional writing since I was old enough to hold a pen, basically. I grew up with my dad reading me The Hobbit, and I devoured every bit of sci-fi and fantasy I could get my young hands on from that moment forward. And, with that much imagination-inspiring content going in, it was only natural that fanfiction and imagined worlds and new original writing would come out. (I still have a large portion of my very first bits of writing stashed away in keepsake boxes)
What projects have you done or will you do?
I eluded to this above, but currently I have a few things on the go! I'm almost ready to shove a self-published book of Worldbuilding prompts out the door and onto the Amazon/Kindle Direct Publishing thing, which is super fun. I'll hopefully have that out by the end of the month, and once that's done I'll be taking a look at my old #WorldbuildingWednesday posts to clean them up and make them into a Worldbuilding Guide that I'll self-publish as well.
I'm also working on a "Born on the Belt" game-hack to the Dead Belt tabletop game, which will end up as something of a fusion between traditional Dead Belt and the Hell Diver's series of books. Basically, I'm looking to re-theme it from searching derelict space vessels, to scavenging post-apocalyptic cities and towns in an attempt to keep the last of humanity alive and in the air. It's a fun concept that I've been slowly chipping away at for a month or so. It won't make the deadline for the Dead Belt Game Jam on Itch.io (https://itch.io/jam/deadbelt) but that's okay - I knew I had too many projects right now and too little time.
Another active project is a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure quest expansion for Marching Order (https://crumblingkeep.com/product/marching-order/) which is a great game that my friends at the Crumbling Keep made. I've drawn up two of the three dungeon floors that I plan to set my story in already, so this project is coming together fairly nicely! I've got a ghost of a plot already in my head that will take a bit of refining, but I think in the end it'll be a very satisfying adventure for folks to play through, and will probably be my first modestly priced dive into TTRPG content creation. I suspect I'll sell the adventure for something like 2-5$ or so. It'll depend how much writing goes into it I guess.
How do you like to spend time on your art or creativity?
I honestly treat my Hive posts as something of a first-draft / brain-dump for ideas and to see what things work/don't work, so I find that a lot of my current content I do my initial rough work here while listening to music and such and then I take these blog posts, jot some notes down and pick out the things I like, and I re-work that into something useable outside of HIVE. For most of my fiction and writing-based works, this has been a pretty good way to do things.
Outside of that, I like to spend as much time as I can up at my kitchen table (where there's nice light) or outside as I can while I'm drawing or recording.
Whew, that was a long one! I hope I didn't bore you all too much getting through that mountain of text. If you made it this far, thanks for reading! And, why not join the Worldbuilding community? We make cool stuff! Link is below!!
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