FLIES FLIES FLIES

After spinning my wheels on unfinished projects for a long time, I've settled on one with the right balance of manageable scope vs. passionate ideas. We're gonna see how it goes.

It comes from a really vivid dream I had, where I turned into a fly who was also a (completely powerless) superhero.

Fall of 2019, I started taking a Screenwriting Workshop class, and chose to write tv scripts for an animated comedy show following the vague story in my dream. That semester and the Spring 2020 semester (part of which took place in Discord, because we were all quarantined) I ended up writing a very rough six-episode season of the show, then refining the first episode to a point where I could submit it to TV pilot writing contests. I wanted it to be made into an actual adult cartoon like BoJack Horseman or Rick and Morty.

So far, that pilot--or 'Flylot'--script was chosen as a Finalist in one contest, the Wiki Screenplay Contest, which means I can post these cute laurels:

And I'm still entering the script into contests and sending it around to see if the Hollywood dream could come true. BUT. With COVID variants and the climate crisis so big on my mind, I decided I can't keep waiting around to break into the show biz. I'm a gamedev, and I can produce (a janky version of) this thing by my own dang self.

DEMO

So far I have a demo, which includes a pared-down version of the cold open of the pilot. You can play it in your browser here:

DEMO

I've only tested it on laptops/desktops, never a mobile device. If you try on your phone and it works, let me know!

Screenshots

The character sprites in the demo are all by MalibuDarby. The rest of the base assets are from various public domain sources.

For such a short demo, there is TONS of code behind the scenes to make it happen (including a custom programming language and text editor). I'm excited to write more later about the journey so far.

More good news!

The pilot script was named as a semi-finalist in the ISA Sci-Fi & Fantasy + Genre Busting Screenplay Competition! (Kind of a mouthful.) Apparently ISA stands for International Screenwriters' Association, and semi-finalist status comes with 3 months of membership in a program they have for connecting screenwriters with paid writing gigs. I'm probably gonna look into that, because getting paid for writing is pretty awesome.

Riding the confidence boost from this contest placement, I've set a goal to finish the first episode and submit it to MidWest Weird Fest, which seems like a good venue to debut the project. The tricky part is that I've missed every deadline for submission except for the final, FINAL late submission deadline of December 17. So yeah--paying late fees for contest submissions, and self-imposing crunch to make a deadline, is always nice.

I put together a voice cast for the pilot, consisting of friends I made in the Screenwriting class where I originally wrote the scripts for the show. The next two weeks are gonna be jam-packed with meeting with the cast on Discord and using Craig (Discord bot) to record lines remotely. I decided I'm gonna play a kinda big voice role myself, which is fun and challenging. Of course, if the pilot gets any traction for a real studio production, this cast might be entirely temporary. Who knows.