Retired: Project Planning - the Laubersheimer Industries Way (Stage 1)

Originally published: Oct 29, 2009

Project Future Boys is still bangin' along nicely. I feel like end of December to end of January is a safe date range to predict for completion. Not too far past my super optimistic first thoughts and still turbo speed compared to any thing else I've worked on in a long while.

I swear I'll take pictures at some point and share my progress. Really. Scout's honor.

But the nub of my gist isn't lame excuses.

The Eldar will actually be completed in the foreseeable future and X-mas approaches- which means my mind is wandering over new projects more than usual.

Today I want to share my thoughts (or start doing so) on how I go about picking and planning a new project. Everyone has there own way of doing things and I think a peek into someone else's thoughts is always a little fun for me. Since a new project idea has firmly taken root in my brain, I can write about what's going through my head as it happens.

As you can probably guess from the title, this will be a multi-part series.

Stage 1: Passive Brainstorming

At this point in what can be loosely defined as a process, I'm not consciously looking for a project. Most of the projects I actually start, spend some amount of time in jumbled in a cloud of thoughts about stuff I'd like to do. And let me tell you, there's a lot of stuff in that cloud.

At any given time, I have a number of nascent and aged ideas running around my head all vying for attention.

[Stream of conscious moment]: Fuck you, above sentence! That is just the worst thing I've written in a long while. I can just imagine my readers imagining me writing that sentence with a snifter of brandy in one hand and a thesaurus in the other while lounging in my library surrounded by large oaken furniture and an old globe. When did I get to be such a pretentious fuck?

OK... I'm primarily an information reader. Its one of the reasons I have so many rulebooks for so many games on my shelves... in my library... on large shelves... I also tend to spend a lot of time on the internet devouring the knowledge of others - gaming related or not. I like to check facts, re-read stuff and so on as part of that. Ever paused an episode of MST3K to look up an obscure reference to an author and end up searching a library catalog for some books only to find that you've wasted 45 minutes between point A and B reading literary criticism and wikipedia pages? I have. That's just a taste of the ridiculous amounts of reading I do and the strange information needs my brain creates.

As I spend a ton of time thinking about painting and gaming, I also do a lot of reading on the subjects. Hand in hand with this is a general habit of trawling the internet for inspiration. I look for new tutorials, pictures of other people's work, beefy army lists, tactics discussions and so on. Due to these compulsions, I've always got a ton of ideas floating around in my head - many of them only feasible once I've won the lottery.

[Note to self]: you have to actually buy lotto tickets to win the lottery.

So, I've got all these ideas stored up. Some are almost fully formed projects. Others are just one-off ideas for a single model. All that's needed is some kind of alignment of the planets to get one of those ideas out of my head and into production (and develop it further if need be).