The Thousander Club -- A Challenge to All of You

Last week on the Low Poly Coop blog I followed up my look back on 2005 with a road map of where I plan to go in the coming year. You could call it goals or a set of New Year's resolutions -- it mostly came down to what I am planning personally to do in the coming year. I also detailed a challenge I am setting for myself to focus on creating artwork for the coop and threw out a challenge or two to the coop community contributors. One of the challenges, though, I think can extend well beyond the confines of a single project and I am now going to throw it out to all you indidevs here on GG.

The Thousander Club
As part of the overarching goals I have for the coming year, I am issuing a set of challenges to myself and the community as well by creating the Thousander Club. It is based off the somewhat well-know idea that practice is just as important as talent (I read about it on the great GBGames blog) and that mastery of a skill is achieved after 10,000 hours of dedicated practice. That even 1000 hours can lead to the level of experienced expert. I've probably devoted more than 1000 hours to modelling and developing art for games in the past year or so. But, it's been kind of all over the place. So, this year, I am going to focus. I am focussing on the Co-op. And I will be challenging myself to dedicate 1000 hours in 2006 to creating artwork for the coop. That's a lot. That's more than 20 hours a week, more even, considering the fact that I will be off the clock for a couple months when my new baby arrives. I am also requiring myself to only count art time. This blog does not count, answering emails or posting to the forums does not count, unless the forum post is specifically devoted to the creation and discussion of particular artwork. I don't expect anyone else to devote even a fraction of that amount of time to this particular project. But, I do challenge you to do this for yourself. When I first wrote this, the Thousander Club was a club of one -- just me. I think I might have managed to pull a couple people into this scheme today, but, I would love to have some more company. C'mon, join up with me, there's a certain comfort in doing things together. Pledge to devote yourself to working on your own project for 1000 hours this year. Keep track, I will. Give progress reports, I will . In a year, we can all look back and count ourselves as experienced experts. Think of the Christmas present you will be giving yourself in 2006 -- confident assurance that your skills can take you where you want to go.

C'mon, I dare ya.

Coming Up
Here again is a preview of what is coming up on the Low Poly Coop site -- I will be debuting this tomorrow. Thanks to Justin Smith of Sanctus Legacy, who has kindly allowed me to donate a small portion of the work I did for him last year, I have been able to kick-start a new fantasy/medieval themed content pack. Here are samples of the WIP models.



Until next time...

Stay free.

Scott