DEV BLOG: PROXY
Squadrons of Words
Greetings all you Myopic Maniacs, and welcome to the first of our twice-weekly Dev blog. This new feature is a chance for us to pull back the curtain and show you what we’ve been up to during lockdown.
To do that, we’ll be sharing our internal one-sheets with all of you. Think of them as a kind of single-page pitch document designed to preserve an idea’s authenticity as it moves through production. This first section is all about what inspired the work. We find that super helpful for distilling ideas into bite sized chunks. Hopefully, you will too.
As process geeks ourselves, we thought this was a great way to not only expand on our lore for the fans but also to inspire future creators by giving them a chance to see how ideas at Myopic come to life.
MONOCHROME DELIRIOUS
When you get to this side of the page, we transition away from the meta of the thing, and we start to tell you a story. It might come at you as an excerpt from an in-world historical text or perhaps a tale told by a particular character in the first-person.
Sometimes, when everything is firing just right, it may even show up in other narrative works. Whatever form it takes, we confine it to this side of the page where we can constrain the word count, often highlighting a key phrase or concept from the body text for emphasis.
… and we start to tell you a story.
Limiting the size and scope in this way may seem like a strange idea at first blush, but it’s not. It predates us all. Like other creative folk, we’ve found the Spartan aesthetic has always helped us flourish. Limitation breeds innovation and limiting word count is one of several things we do to distill our ideas to their core.
At this point, these pages are sort of a ritualized habit, a place where we take an idea from one of my many notebooks, discuss it, and bring its contents to life in the Myopic Library.
In fact, many of these ideas were born ages ago on long, late-night walks with friends. Almost all of whom stumbled into one facet of the entertainment industry or another.
The Sound and the Fury
Once we’ve given you the nuts and bolts of the idea, we supplement that info, providing bulleted tropes or additional context as needed. For instance, all of our Dev Blog entries fall into one of the following five headings:
- Key Characters
- Secret Origins
- Milestones
- Factions
- Races
THE WIND-DOWN
Now, if for some reason, after all that prelude, there’s more to say, it lands here. This is where we bring things to a close. It might take the form of an epilogue or some tangential detail that completes the thought.
Whatever the case, this is our last chance to take the formless beginnings of an idea and turn it into something viable you can take with you out into the world.
Enjoy