Last night, I caved and bought the new FTL game that all my friends have been talking about.
OMIGOSH.
Six hours later, I was screaming in agony as my awesome starship went down in flames. AGAIN. In sector eight (on the easy setting, though, so not too impressive).
Seriously, this game is AMAZING. I haven’t seen such a perfect combination of strategy, skill, random chance, and dumb luck since Star Control II. There are SO MANY things you can do … and SO MANY ways you can die! I love it!
Granted, with every game like this, there’s a danger that it will become a huge time suck (minecraft, anyone?). However, this one is different.
Famous last words, right?
But seriously, each round takes only an hour or two, there’s only one save slot, and you die so frequently that it’s hard to become too attached to any one game. In other words, this is the sort of game I can pick up and put down again without devoting too much mental space to it. Which (hopefully) makes it a perfect carrot to get me to write more.
Here’s what I’m going to do: for every thousand words in my WIP, I’ll allow myself to play one (and only one!) round of FTL. If I hit my daily goal, I’ll allow myself to play as much as I want.
It’s still too early to tell if this is going to work, but I’m going to give it a try. Seriously, though, once I told myself “you can play FTL as soon as you hit that first 1k,” all I wanted to do was write! And now that I’m more or less finished with this blog post, I think that’s what I’m going to do.
Later!
