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Radiation, Game Idea, Etc

6 years ago4,030 words

I feel terrible still, but here's some disjointed rambling about my upcoming radiotherapy, the previous post's comments, Toby Fox, and ideas for a game I might make about a consciousness researcher exploring the afterlife.

I'm still feeling really out of it, lousy, far less than ideal. It's been three weeks since the brain surgery. I'm surprised actually how well my body seems to be operating, at least in terms of the basics, but in my head I'm still not quite all here. It's annoying.

I saw the surgeon at the brain hospital yesterday. He said he'd removed about 3/4 of the tumour; I assume the rest was of a weird shape that was hard to get at using surgical techniques. It's sort of encroaching upon one of my thalami, you see; it's not like a clear and obvious round, encapsulated thing like some tumours seem to be. When I asked whether he'd removed my pineal gland or not, he literally shrugged and said he had no idea. It looks too much like the tumour mass to be sure whether it's still there or not. I'm able to sleep, and dream, but it's still... weird, in a way I can't quite describe. It's getting better though, I think. The weird issue listening to music is also thankfully gone; it doesn't sound tinny and out of key anymore.

The surgeon told me that I'll need to get radiotherapy to remove the last of the tumour (or as much as is reasonable, anyway; it'll never be 100% gone, and there's always a chance it'll recur whatever they do). That'll involve going to a nearby hospital every day to have my brain bombarded with radiation, for several weeks. How it works, it seems, is that several beams are shot from different angles, none of which are powerful enough alone to damage healthy tissue, but they all converge at one point and 'add up' to a dose of radiation that's lethal to the cancer cells. I don't know why it has to be done every day, though. Apparently it's only like two minutes a day, and it's painless, but the hassle of setting up for it isn't something I'm looking forward to. It can also make you very fatigued, and can - probably will - lead to hair loss in the patches where the beams go in (if it's so damaging to skin and hair, doesn't it damage the brain as well?). So that's great. I'll be starting that in 'a few weeks' and it'll go on for 'a few weeks' (nothing was really certain), so it looks like I'm going to be incapacitated for a while. I was expecting that anyway, though.

Because of that, I'm not exactly able to do the sorts of things I'd like to do. Talking with people is difficult, and I feel I've been especially bad at replying to messages and stuff. Not that I was ever good at that - I really wasn't! - but now it's hard to write anything at all. Even writing this is difficult! I'm having to pace myself, take my time. I just don't want to be invisible, especially since I think this whole process is 'interesting', in a dark kind of way.



I read the comments on the previous posts and wanted to reply to them, because I appreciate them and want people to feel appreciated by me too (I hate the thought of just ignoring people who put the effort in), but since I'm still feeling so wretched, I intend for this post to be a sort of general reply to the things that people have mentioned. Not ideal, but nothing is at the moment, sadly.

One thing I wanted to comment about was Toby Fox, who was mentioned in a few comments on the previous post, including the suggestion that I could even potentially work with him and that our ideas would be in sync and such. I'd be lying if I said the idea was unappealing to me. I know he had great success with Undertale, and he's certainly made a name for himself, so it'd be interesting to see what kind of ideas he has (also it's weird we have the same first name, and his surname is one I wish I had myself). But... Well, mostly I know that person from when he composed music for Homestuck, years ago, so it was quite surprising to me when he made a game and it turned so big. I wonder whether the social clout he gained from composing especially good music for Homestuck was a factor there, or whether there's a load of other stuff that I just don't know about. I haven't actually even played Undertale, though. It's not because I'm not interested; I am! It's entirely because I see it as competition in a way that might just be entirely demotivating... and I hate that I see it that way. I can watch or play games like Marvel Strike Force, Breath of the Wild, or Red Dead Redemption, and see that they're great in their own ways, but they're so different to anything I do or could make that I don't see them as immediate competition. The work of Toby Fox has been compared directly to my own work though, and it sounds like the work of one person doing the kind of thing I wish I could successfully do myself. Even using not-entirely-dissimilar ideas. Hearing about his new project being not unlike my own didn't make me think "ooh, I should investigate!", it made me think "oh no, should I even bother then?!"... but I really don't like that this is the case.

It's an anxiety thing, ultimately. I'm plagued by tremendous doubt about my ideas, despite the reassurances that people give, and even the slightest hints - even if they're imaginary - that my ideas won't work out or be original quickly snowball into crippling doubt that stops me dead in my tracks. It's awful, and I wouldn't choose for my mind to work like this. I wish I could look at the similar work of others and be inspired by it rather than put off. Perhaps it's something I can work on, though. With visual art, I didn't draw for years - and I couldn't check deviantART - because I was so insecure about my drawing abilities. I put time and effort into improving, though, and around 2012, I underwent a sort of inner transformation that allowed me not just to draw again, but to use others' work as direct inspiration rather than seeing it as off-putting competition. Perhaps the same could happen with games development, or whatever I intend to do, but I feel like I'd actually have to produce something first since that's how it worked with art. It's far easier to get discouraged when all you have are half-baked ideas rather than anything solid and tangible.

I don't think that Toby Fox would be interested in working with someone like me, because while I have ideas, the good ones haven't yet come to fruition. But if my anxiety wasn't so crippling, I'd be interested to contact him just to see how his mind works (though people have contacted me with that intention and I've not replied... which I feel bad about). Maybe I'll at least build up to looking at his work first. It'll be a process. A stupid process, since my mind won't let me do basic things without huge effort. Urgh.

I've been meaning to contact Greg of Kongregate, actually, since I found out about his spiritual experiences (or whatever you'd call them) which weren't unlike my own. I was linked to his site about all that... but I've yet to read it. Again, it's an anxiety thing, though it's especially stupid in this case because the whole nature of the content is supposed to be ego-transcending, above and beyond these kinds of mental barriers. But it really is a barrier, and it really holds me back. Connections are made by contacting people about similar experiences like this... but I've always been so hopeless at that because of this awful anxiety. My mind just says "you'll only make a fool of yourself, don't bother", so I remain trapped, alone, in this pit. Sigh. I don't know if overcoming it is even possible, but if it is, it's not something that can be done like a flip of a switch. It's a process.

Someone suggested that I should sell the old MARDEK games on Steam. While that's not a bad idea, I doubt it's feasible because of the ridiculous way that those games were actually made. They were made in ActionScript 2, which was already obsolete when I used it (I learned ActionScript 3 and used that for later games, starting with the rarely-mentioned Clarence and including Taming Dreams, but even that was years ago). They didn't use any sensible coding practices - like keeping things object-oriented - and they're essentially all hard-coded in a way that would make me beyond exasperated now. Or they would, if I even had the original files, which I don't think I do. I also feel that I've grown so much since the old MARDEK chapters that - despite people's fond appreciation for them - I'd be embarrassed to have my current self directly associated with them. I mean, I like the idea that they're something that past-me made and past-others enjoyed, and I don't want to somehow undo that... But they're lacking in a lot of qualities I'd like to explore these days, and releasing just three chapters of a supposedly larger story would just invite more "where's MARDEK 4??" comments, and I don't want that. Did I ever write in detail about why I wasn't going to make MARDEK 4? Maybe I was getting to it with the My Story posts (I'll return to those soon, probably), but didn't get to that point before the surgery. There are many reasons, but they're strong ones that make the thought of making it entirely unappealing to me. I mean, I wish MARDEKs 4-8 existed, as many people do, but I don't want to personally make them, you know?

Someone else suggested I make a point-and-click adventure game. That's not a bad idea either, but I don't think I will, just because that's a genre I don't particularly have any experience with. I never played Monkey Island (I had friends who talked about it but never bothered to investigate it myself), and I can't think of any particular examples I've played and adored. I've definitely played some, but they never spoke to me in the way that JRPGs for whatever reason did.

I agree that people who grew up with my games would be more willing to pay money for things I'd make now. That's giving me hope. I just need to actually make something with paying for!

Hearing positive comments about my past work also motivates me to try to make something. So I hope that I can. As I said previously, I'm still planning on doing the non-game Taming Dreams that I'd tell over a long, long period of time (projects like Order of the Stick come to mind, as they often do; that's been going for over a decade and isn't finished yet, and I still check it every day). I'd also like to make a game though, and while I've not actually made anything yet, I've had some ideas, which I'd like to talk a bit about here. Keep in mind it's all up in the air and subject to complete change though; I haven't settled on anything. This is just my bleary mind entertaining whatever floats dreamily into it.



I've come up with a number of games focused around some shy, INFJ young female protagonist, for a number of reasons. It's simply wish fulfillment, for a start; as a guy, I'm attracted to young women, and so making a protagonist who is one activates parts of my mind that wouldn't be activated if the character was, say, an overweight older man. There's also the fact that I've never felt particularly masculine, so using a female character allows me to write someone who comfortably fits with my own outlook without it coming across as odd and inappropriate. Or at least that was the hope. I'm not sure how effective it actually is in practice.

That idea appealed to me and still does... but I wonder. I wrote in the previous post about potentially getting a job as some kind of consciousness researcher, and I've been giving that some thought. What would day-to-day life like that involve? If I made any world-changing discoveries, what would they look like?

I wondered whether to make a game where the protagonist is a 30-to-40-year-old male who's a consciousness researcher. So he's at an established point in his life rather than still in the intro. He'd be eccentric, and would find interacting with other people difficult. As such, he'd have lived a lonely life deprived of experiences; he'd be single, perhaps he's never had a partner, and he shows up at work at odd hours to avoid most other people. Despite that, he'd be intelligent and would express eager fascination at anything involving consciousness, the mind, things like that.

The story might begin with him showing up to his lab at an odd hour - either late at night or early in the morning - and checking some experiments he's done which involve making clones of creatures to see whether the exact copy is alive, and conscious... It's based around something I've mentioned a lot, which is that if you had a perfect copy of yourself - down to every atom, every memory - standing right before you, why wouldn't you be seeing from its eyes? Would anything be seeing from behind those eyes? Would it be conscious, or would something beyond the physical be missing? I'd love to test that. Obviously it's not possible with current technology, but maybe this setting would include technology that can create copies like that.

While this protagonist avoids most people, there's a woman who works as an assistant in his lab, who he's awkward around but quite fond of. He entertains the idea of them becoming a couple, but she's already got at least one child - maybe a partner too - and doesn't see him in that way. That's an interesting dynamic to explore, I think, because it's so common in the real world, but stories are typically contrived in the sense that everyone's single (isn't it odd that you can get JRPG groups of people of varying ages, and most don't have partners to go home to?), and there tends to be just one big Relationship between two primary characters who might not even be especially compatible, but due to their roles in the story they inevitably end up together anyway. It's so far removed from how real relationships are, but we all take it for granted because that's just how stories are. (I know not all stories are like that, and 'shipping' exists for a reason, but still, you probably know what I'm talking about at least.)

Something could happen - I'm still working on this bit - that leads to the apparent death of the protagonist. He awakens in what appears to be the afterlife, and is is awe of it all, comparing it to his research and ideas. This afterlife realm would make up the majority of the game, and your ultimate aim would be to meet 'God'... though I've yet to decide on the details of the journey or the ultimate meaning of his presence there. It might not even be the afterlife; it could be a dream-like inner experience that he's having in order to overcome his issues and change the course of his life.

For whatever reason, the woman from the lab would join him as an additional playable character. Perhaps she apparently dies due to whatever factor caused the protagonist to die (perhaps the first human 'clone' had a mind but wasn't conscious, and the confusion makes it fly into a rage and destroy the lab? Seems very sci-fi and silly though, maybe). Or, if it's his inner world, she's there because he thinks about her a lot.

Other characters might join him, too. Perhaps I could make use of Viva, the 'angel' from the Divine Dreams idea that I wrote about a while ago. I also imagined a self-professed 'Psychic', who the protagonist once worked with, finding his or her way into this afterlife realm and helping him out. Maybe this person is a relative who died a while back, and appears for that reason, as a guide. I don't know.

In Divine Dreams, I intended the story to explore the afterlife, though the protagonist was a gothy young woman who'd committed suicide. I still like a lot of elements of that story and setting, and I have great interest in anything that explores the afterlife so I'd love to create such a thing myself, but I don't know that using a suicide victim as the protagonist is the best idea. Her interpretation of the afterlife would be one of fear and confusion, whereas this protagonist's would be of awe and a desire to research and understand, and I feel that those differing interpretations would affect the overall feeling of the experience hugely. Personally I'd be more interested to see the awe approach just because I've never seen that done before - whereas fear and confusion are so common - and it'd be really interesting for me to write.

Obviously this protagonist would be largely based on myself, and that feels quite narcissistic. Other character creators tend to avoid making characters based on themselves, it seems, or those that obviously are are decried as self-inserts (and seem to appear a lot in sex fiction). So I'm very aware of that. I think though that the way in which I'd be basing this on myself would be hopefully interesting enough - in the way that maybe a train wreck is interesting - to be worth forming a story around. I mean, some people already follow my real life and mind in this blog... I also wonder whether it could be therapeutic, making a game where someone I can directly relate to overcomes their inner difficulties. That's been the hope for most of my projects in the past few years, since this crippling anxiety really does deprive me of so many experiences and - more importantly - relationships. It is - as I said - absolutely awful, so any way of overcoming it is appealing to me. It could even help others with similar issues, though that's not the aim as such.

For previous projects, I came up with a character called 'Sam Sara', in two different incarnations. I wonder whether to use that name and general character design for this one. Well, a tweaked version of it, anyway; something I'd hope might be not entirely unappealing. I just really like the name Sam Sara, and it fits with the whole thing I'd be trying to do.

While it would be interesting coming up with a whole bunch of diverse characters, it'd be far more within the realm of practicality to focus on a small number, like three or four. More than one, otherwise runes wouldn't make sense as a gameplay mechanic (and I really want to include those), but not more than one party's worth, so then I could focus on each one enough to flesh them out.

Gameplay would involve JRPG-like turn-based battles, with personality-based runes and 'emotion'-based skills, etc. Like in Taming Dreams and some other recent projects I've worked on. I imagine characters could be built up in some way too. I'll have to give the actual gameplay stuff some more thought at a later point. Ultimately it'd be about 'overcoming issues', though, rather than violence. Like maybe this person has been held back by fears etc all his life, and he encounters those fears here and seeks to tame them so as to move past them. Perhaps it's not possible to arrive at 'God' without first cleansing oneself of Earthly hang-ups.

I wonder whether I could use 'retro' pixel graphics, at least in part. I'm able to make 3D graphics, though they're not great; they're like PS2 sort of quality, not really on the same level as the really impressive stuff people are capable of these days. I hope that people would forgive mediocrity if they learned I'd done everything myself, but I also have experience making pixel art, and it'd be a shame not to use that at all.

Recently, I saw a video that I really wish I could find a link to, but annoyingly I can't! I saw it before the surgery, on my phone, and apparently the history doesn't go far back enough for me to find it... Basically, it showed a man's entire life in a pixelated, game-like format, with him growing up, falling in love, his wife leaving him, and ultimately he died of a heart attack in the middle of the street. All of this had a GUI at the top showing his health, amount of money, etc. After he died, the pixel, NES-game-like view switched to that of a 3D 'being of light' looking at a computer screen, with the option to start a New Game available. It did so, and a new life began, the same as the last, again in pixels. This time, however, the person decided to become a 'bad boy', breaking rules and having wild parties with multiple women. He died young, but lived fast and hard, earning loads more money in the process. Again, his death led to a view switch to the 3D 'being of light', but this time it decided to ascend up beyond the top of the screen instead of playing the game again.

I really wish I could find that thing! I've no idea what to search for to find it, either... I tried a few things but couldn't find it. It's not in my YouTube history either; I think it was an embedded video in a Reddit thread or something, but I don't know where. I really wanted to link to it, but that description will have to do.

The point is that it made an impact on me because it followed two entire lifetimes of the same essential being, which was interesting in itself, but it also used a switch between graphics - NES-like and 3D - to show transcendence beyond the Earthly world.

I'd be curious to do that myself. Either just battles are 3D, since they represent some kind of inner emotions-overcoming experience rather than actually fighting external creatures, or maybe the entire afterlife is 3D but the Real Life part before it isn't. I think the switch could be really interesting either way. It'd be using the nature of the medium to communicate a message... and I imagine Sam Sara finding it absolutely fascinating seeing himself in a form his previously pixelated self could scarcely comprehend.

Anyway, obviously you can tell that my 'ideas', such that they are, for a game like this are scattered at best. I don't have a clear plot yet, or even a clear cast of characters or gameplay rules or anything like that. So this post is less pitch-like than some previous ones, like about Divine Dreams, etc. Still, I wonder whether it'd be worthwhile to base a story around a protagonist like that. I wonder whether people would actually be able to empathise with him... but then there are games where you play as a Generic White Man or some grizzled cowboy or street gangster and people seem to have no issues with those...

I'm going to keep trying to come up with ideas so then I can make something more fully-formed out of this, though obviously I can't do very much at the moment due to the nature of my injury. So I'm quite out of commission still, but I'm listening!