Alora Fane

So, now that the 2018th year since our Lord Jesus Christ hatched from his egg is gasping out its final breaths, I feel the compulsion to have a look at exactly how I've wasted this period of my life that I'll never get back. I graduated from university (and made it through alive, to my surprise), I had brain surgery for a cancerous tumour (and made it through alive, to my surprise), and I did a bunch of creative stuff but never actually finished or released anything (and made it through alive, to the absolute shock of everyone). That's... something?

'Something' is the best way to put it, really. It's not been a good year by any stretch of the imagination... but I don't feel like it's been a complete waste of time either. It's been eventful, in a personally-and-mentally kind of way, even if what I've been up to is worlds away from the relationships-and-career stuff that most people define their lives around.

At the start of the year, I was still at university... Still reeling from the pain of being cut out by that one close friend I'd managed to make, following my disastrous trip to South Korea with her the previous summer. I feel embarrassed about that all the time. Not just the way that things turned out, like a poor victim - "how dare she!" - but at myself, my own mind, for seeing things this way at all. I suppose to people who are more well-adjusted, more fortunate, my desperate rantings about it all - which I wrote out way too candidly here - must look pathetically insane; a kind of severe oddness worthy of pity, frustration, and/or mockery. I say that because I feel that's what it is, objectively, at least in the eyes of the rest of the average world. I could go on and on about why I react to things or behave the way I do - I certainly think about it all the time - but for now, I'll just sigh about it all. It is what it is. I've got serious mental health issues, which make my social interactions and connections tumultuous and deeply damaging to both parties, and that's not something that I can change, unfortunately. My efforts to venture into the social world seeking change have only made me especially aware of how severely abnormal I am, and how tolerant of that the average person very much isn't.

I've been coming to terms with that recently, I feel. Accepting it. Accepting that my lot in life isn't to play the social game, to have healthy connections, to love and be loved. There's peace in solitude, and it affords me opportunities that I wouldn't have if I were caught up in the rat race, rearing rowdy rugrats. Buckling under the weary nagging of a disappointed spouse, wrestling with jealousy, doubt, insecurity, constant fear. Slaving away at a job I can't stand exploiting strangers to put ever-fatter wads of cash in the pockets of narcissistic fatcats. None of that is for me.

I'm 30 and I currently still live at home with my parents. I've never had a job, and the one stormy long-distance relationship I had ended many years ago. I've been torn apart by the less than promising trajectory of my life for years now, and I hoped that going to university might allow me to get on that well-worn track, better late than never. But that didn't go as planned. I attempted suicide more than once because I feared that I might not be able to climb out of the pit I'm in. That I'd be unloved, alone, useless to society. And because the mental scars that the discomfort of others left in my mind ached so much and I just wanted that to be over. Dark thoughts. Dark times.

I'm currently in the middle of this radiotherapy that I've been writing about, following an 8-hour-long surgery to chop out a lump of cancer in the core of my cortex, and the hellish hospital stay that followed that. Getting back my basic physical and cognitive faculties has been an ordeal, and it's not even in the past; the effects of the radiotherapy will last well into the future, I've been told. My hair's already falling out in big clumps. And I've been facing most of this alone. Some people are surrounded by swarms of their darling loved ones during tough times such as these, but I'm not so lucky.

And yet... Despite this horror show I've been through these past few months, and which I'm still in the middle of, I feel calmer now than I ever did while I had a couple of people close to me in university. I'm not actively suicidal like I was back then (though the idea is always in the background; that's just a part of the condition I have). And that's all because I don't actively have to worry about the behaviour of others on a daily basis. Whether they like or care about me, whether they'll reject or replace me, whether they'll want something from me. It's easier for me, it seems, to know I'm alone than to worry that maybe what little I do have won't last.

Well, I say I'm 'alone', but I feel that whenever I say things like that, it's an insult to my parents, or the people who support me here... But you probably know what I mean. I'm 'alone' in the sense that I don't have close friends or a partner; I lack the intimate connections that others' lives revolve around. I appreciate the kinds of connections I do have - I wouldn't bother posting here if not for the few people who do read what I write, and I wouldn't have survived the hospital experience if not for my parents - but still. It's not exactly the same. It doesn't scratch the right itch. Because that itch is on my man sausage. Do you want to scratch my man sausage? My parents don't. I hope you're picturing this vividly.

But as I said, I'm finding peace with that. The lack of intimacy. Reading the misogynistic mouth-frothing of incels and Men Going Their Own Way - who constantly present and deride garish caricatures of women, exaggerations of the most boisterous ones - has helped me a lot. I don't mean that I hate women now - I don't - and I wouldn't associate directly with either of those groups (especially since I know 'incel' has essentially become a slur now, a representation of some vile, inhuman archetype, despicable, fair game for vitriol... at least for those who'd rather reject and attack than understand). But the basic ideas that they talk about are, sadly, true of the way that we work, and some of us just aren't going to get what the media has promised us forever, because we weren't sufficiently blessed by genetics, either physically or mentally. Seeing my situation as having dodged a bullet rather than just being miserably cursed really helps to calm the inner storm.

Scrambling desperately to climb out of a pit you're in, gnashing and screaming and bawling, clambering and falling and trying again and again, even though it never works... That kind of behaviour might seem like a way to reach the heavens that are apparently just out of reach - "just keep at it, you'll get there!" - but all it really brings is pain and exhaustion from repeatedly falling short. But accepting that the pit is what you have, where you are, sitting on the ground and painting pictures in the dirt... Maybe that's a better way to be. You're going to be trapped and die either way, but whether it's a suffocating trap denying you the world, or a peaceful retreat to escape the world's stresses, is at least a matter of choice, to the degree that anything ever is. Buddhism is all about suppressing and overcoming desire, because desire to have what you don't - or can't- have really is the root of all suffering. And it doesn't make you happy, you know. Having things. It's all a matter of perception; an enlightened beggar can be happier than an overstressed billionaire, potentially.

So that's what's been on my mind for a while now, beside all this brain cancer treatment stuff. I probably won't ever have a girlfriend, or a typical job. And that's fine. I wouldn't be able to cope with either if I had them anyway. Or they'd cause me far more pain than pleasure. I'm not cut out for the real world. Reading my ramblings probably makes that fairly clear. I'm too odd.

At this time for many years now, I've written sadly (I think, I really don't want to check) about my singleness, my longing for belonging, my isolation, and I've New Year's Resolved to correct that, to find the love I'm lacking, somehow. So this is a change of tune for me.

Yes, my life is awful, and I'm a loser in the eyes of the ordinary world. But not everyone has to take the same general path through the world. Perhaps something valuable can come from those who fall off that path and find a different way, who can only observe it from a distance.

As an outlook, this is a work in progress of course - I've written a few posts along the same lines recently - and I imagine my days of ranting about my ~pain and suffering~ aren't over (to the joy of everyone, I'm sure). But I do feel that I've learned some important lessons that will help me to appreciate the peace and solitary opportunities my position offers.

I see my years in terms of my creative pursuits. I keep records of everything I make, organised by year, and I frequently look back on past years to see how I'm coming along. What I've achieved, how I've changed. So that's what I'll spend the rest of this post talking about.

I hoped to release some proper project, a game or something, in 2018, but I suppose the university and brain cancer things got in the way just a little bit. I feel that I'm getting more seriously into games development again now, but it's going to be a process overcoming this brain stuff and getting to a point where I can devote myself to creative pursuits as my life purpose.

...I just spent quite a while making a large "Summary of Art" image, like I do every year, where I collect a number of thumbnails of art and ideas that I produced for each month (six for each month this year; the only thing I struggled with when filling them was deciding what not to include). At first I was quite happy to show these summaries off - eager, even - but for years now they've just been too embarrassing for that, and I'd rather keep them to myself. Largely because of the amount of naked women that end up filling up too many of the slots. A poor way of coping with the loneliness, that.

I'd have to blank out like half the slots if I were to post this year's one big Summary of Art image here due to that embarrassment, so I won't do that. Instead, I'll go through each of the months individually, with a little bit about what I made - or attempted to make - during them. I'll just pretend the stuff that goes in those hypothetically blanked out slots doesn't exist, even though it's been the biggest chunk of my creative output this year. Otherwise you'd have to read my neurotic ramblings about the insecure allure of plump jumper dumplings, and nobody wants that. Probably. I mean, I bet someone does, but I'm not doing that. Again. Today, anyway.

January

2018 began, as many years do, with a January. It feels like an eternity ago... I was exploring VR, after getting myself an Oculus Rift the Christmas before, and much of my time and effort were devoted to trying to build some kind of virtual world of my own. Nothing fancy, just an island with a simple house, in which lived a girl - Gemma, the placeholder character I always use - who I could interact with to a very limited degree. I hoped eventually I might develop the skills to make a kind of virtual retreat, a virtual friend, where other lonely, suffering people might want to go when they just wanted an escape from the horrors of their isolation, or they just want to be (virtually) around someone who wants to be around them unconditionally, though nothing much came of it. I have a bunch of screenshots, but in hindsight the model of the girl looks awful, embarrassing, so I'd rather not include any here.

Because that model left a lot to be desired, I devoted myself to improving my very mediocre 3D modelling skills by doing some long and in-depth YouTube tutorials about the subject. I started on this head:

Is that a man or a woman? Who can say!! Topology-wise it's excellent, but that's because I was copying the tutorial vertex-by-vertex, and the surprisingly female modeller (I see so few) seemed to know what she was doing, so that's hardly a testament to my own skills. I don't think it looks like anyone though. I'm only including it here because I have pretty much nothing else for January. A shame. (I learned a huge amount from doing that though!)

February

In February, I continued with that tutorial, and gave the model a body:

It was based on an actual photo of an actual woman, as per the tutorial, so the proportions are more accurate than anything else I've made (though I don't think that face looks feminine at all...). I followed that up by trying to use this model as a base to make a more realistic version of the Gemma character... but it turned out looking bizarre, unnerving. I did not like it! I'm also not going to include it here, so you'll just have to imagine it. I hope you are doing that right now.

I also made some other characters for the 'personal project' I've mentioned a few times, but I don't want to show those either, even though I learned a lot from the experience and consider it to be an important milestone in my development. Makes me wonder how much other artists just keep to themselves. Hmm.

March

March is when I came up with ideas for - and worked on - a game called Embracing Eternity. I talked about it ∞ here ∞.

That image shows what apparently aren't the final versions of the four primary characters, though it's the best one I've got from March. I thought this idea would work well, and I still like it, but it eventually transformed into a different idea that I've yet to write about, and which I won't focus on until I've got some shorter projects out of the way.

My drawing style isn't really that of an artist, I think when I see things like this. It doesn't have the kind of flow, movement, style, and raw appeal that you'd see in the work of an experienced illustrator or painter. But I mostly use drawings as a kind of planning these days. To determine how 3D models will look, for example. I just can't be bothered spending enough time developing my drawing skills, or working on a single drawing or painting.

April

I continued with Embracing Eternity here, it seems, transforming those concept drawings into 3D models. For example:

There's a lot I like about that character design, though I don't know if I'll ever end up using her in anything. I've since cannibalised a lot of the concepts and motifs for different things I've come up with more recently, at least.

I was using what's called a ∞ 'subsurface modifier' ∞ when modelling at this point, which gives the models a smooth look by algorithmically increasing the number of polygons, but which I've moved away from - and actively dislike - at this point. Still, I made this from scratch myself, so I think that's not too bad considering I was doing those tutorials just a couple of months earlier. (I also really liked what's going on with the shaders, which I was also just learning about at this point. Her rainbow dress, in particular.)

This month also seems to be when I quickly made a working prototype of an RPG thing starring the placeholder character Gemma (and Oneira, who I had a model of from an earlier project), which is actually playable in ∞ the previously-linked-to post ∞; I suppose I made it after coming up with the basic game concepts for Embracing Eternity, but before making the models of its actual characters. Interesting; different to how I remember it. It featured the 'befriending through understanding' (as opposed to killing via violence) concept I used in the app version of Taming Dreams, with similar collectible monsters (called 'figments' here rather than miasmon, for whatever reason).

I quite liked that, and I made it pleasingly quickly, though I overcomplicated things eventually and didn't go anywhere with it. I'd like to return to the general mechanics with a different idea I've yet to write about, though.

May

I don't have any real art for this month, I'm not sure why. I seem to have been working on a version of Embracing Eternity which that previous thing evolved into, but it was overly complex and wouldn't have worked. I didn't stick with it for very long because of that.

It seems I also got back into composing music around this point. I can't show a picture of that though!

June

I don't seem to have done much art here either, but I did build a website on a whim, about the nature of life, death, and the universe (as you do), which I then proceeded to forget about entirely. It was called Cosmic Cartography, and I wrote about it (with links) ∞ in this post ∞.

I also explored an intended-to-be-simpler-but-still-complicated idea that was an offshoot of the previous thing, and I made a somewhat working engine of that... It was about shifting perspectives, how the world changes tone from different characters' eyes, things like that. There wasn't much to it though, and I didn't stick with it for very long at all. (Seems I wrote about it in ∞ this post ∞).

I also spent a few days on a completely different game that I never wrote about and isn't really worth writing about. Just a waste of time, really, that.

July

The mechanical game ideas weren't working out for me; Embracing Eternity appealed to me on an intellectual level, but what I was coming up with was gruelling to make, and wasn't fun to play. I still wanted to tell a meaningful-to-me story though, so I wondered whether it'd be better to tell it in a different, more manageable form instead. I'd spent many months playing around with my private personal project, which is a 'talky thing' where characters just talk in text bubbles among each other; sort of like a series of (barely-)interactive cutscenes. Despite its limitations, I thought that since I enjoyed that format, others might too, just with a story I'd be happy to share.

I built a simple demo that you can interact with to get a clearer idea of what I mean, linked to from ∞ this post ∞.

Eventually I decided to tell the Taming Dreams story in that format, but during July, I was planning to use it to tell a new story, set in a world in which herb-motif'd anthropomorphic 'daemons' hung around with people who had mental illnesses, ostensibly to help them, though people accompanied by daemons in this way were ostracised for it. The plot was about someone burdened with daemons - and cast out because of it - setting out to find God so as to ask why some people were cursed in this way, or something.

I don't think I'll return to that story, but I did make these quick, 'sketchy' models of some of the key characters:

I wrote more about that idea in ∞ this post ∞.

August

In August, I came up with a game idea based on sexually dimorphic, genetically variable 'sindrels', and their rush to find partners before their fleeting lives ended. The idea was to explore how differently the mating game works from male and female perspectives. I made quite a lot of the game, too; I got it working and playable and everything. Even now it doesn't have a proper title though. I wrote about it at exhaustive length in ∞ this post ∞.

This has been on my mind recently, because I've returned to sindrels and want to use them in some other things. I'm still really pleased with the 3D models I made for them!

(They also used the subsurf modifier though, which annoys me now. I'm reusing derivations of these models in my most recent project, but without subsurf. I'm sure this is the most fascinating fact you've heard all year.)

September

In September, I tried to get the ball rolling with Taming Dreams, since I'd apparently decided I'd use that story for the 'talky thing' instead of the one with 'herbal daemons' that I'd come up with a couple of months earlier. I only got as far as making a couple of base models, which I didn't even really like. I did make Enki, though:

That's not too bad, though I see obvious issues with it now.

I never got around to actually starting on Taming Dreams, since the brain surgery was imminent, but I'd still like to return to that once my skills have improved a bit more and I have the time.

October

This is a strange month, since it's when I had ~brain surgery~ and spent a week in hospital, and many more weeks recovering. It seems like I shouldn't have achieved much, considering that, but surprisingly that's not the case.

For a start, I made these two models, which I like a lot:

I also included them in a more elaborate version of the 'talky thing', with clearer characters rather than the not-characters-at-all from the previous mock-up. The short video that I made is linked to from ∞ this post ∞.

That was before the surgery. As soon as I got back from the hospital, I got straight back on my computer (like anyone who'd just had their head cut deeply into for the better part of a day surely would), and I made some models which were new versions of some I'd made for my private personal project a few months earlier. I suppose I turned to that rather than something I could show off or release publicly because it's a comfort, and it's because it's a comfort that I'm keeping it to myself. If I feel people would judge it negatively, that'd be constantly on my mind when I do anything with it, and it'd no longer be a comfort for me. So I'm torn here, because I feel the models I made showed huge progress compared to the ones from earlier in the year, I can look at them and think "I made these just after surgery, wow!", and I want to show screenshots to say "look! I'm getting better! I'm proud of this!!", but... well. It's not worth the risk! And I can't imagine anyone other than me would be all that interested anyway, really.

I did a lot of studying for them too, tracing basic shapes all over photos so as to determine the exact forms and contours my human models needed to include, with particular attention to the shoulders. I tried to match a photo's pose using my model, and if any contours were clearly wrong, I corrected them. Again, I don't want to show the results visually - a shame - but I feel I learned a whole lot from doing that. While my head ached tremendously and I was barely conscious and hadn't slept for days. The best state for knowledge retention and skill building, for sure. I suppose none of this means anything to people who just want to ask me when I'll get back to Deliverance or whatever, anyway. But this is my personal blog, so I'm indulging myself!

November

It seems it was just last month when I came up with an idea I'd really like to make into a proper game, but which I haven't written about in detail yet. I've just hinted at it here and there; it doesn't have a title yet. It'd be a story-driven thing where a 'consciousness scientist' explores a lucid dream, and meets God... which is a terrible way of explaining the extent of what it's meant to be. I only have some exceptionally awful scribbly art of it, unfortunately; the whole reason I never wrote a post about it is because I didn't have any proper concept art to show.

I did a whole lot more in November, but it was mostly on the aforementioned personal project. So while I learned a lot from that, I haven't got anything I can talk about here.

Oh, I did make these sprites though:

They're Gemma, as usual, and I made this as a placeholder character for testing an engine that would be used for that lucid-dream-exploring idea. Since it was going to be an RPG not dissimilar to the ones I made years ago. I'd like to get around to that someday in the hopefully not-too-distant future.
(I had more to say about that sprite, like its proportions and everything, which I gave a lot of thought to at the time, but it seems irrelevant to go on about it here...)

December

And here we are at the end, at the month in I'm while I write this, but which you might not be in as you read it! If anyone even reads these things.

I've been having radiotherapy since the 6th of this month, and it's also during this month that I've decided to devote my attention towards simpler, quicker games that I can make and release, and I've had the focus and motivation to do that. Which is nice, since I'm very aware that I tend to jump from one big idea to the next without ever finishing anything, usually... This post is a testament to that.

I experimented with some ideas that I wrote about ∞ here ∞, including this 'making friends' idea, for which I made some rudimentary beginnings of graphics:

Now that I look at those images again, they look like mannequins, or corpses, or something... since their bodies aren't yet animated or clothed, the lighting is primitive, and the faces are lacking. Unnerving.

More recently, I've started on - and already almost finished! - an idea that I'm currently quite excited about, but which I'd rather explain in its own post rather than cramming in details at the end of this one. Basically though, it's about mimicking melodies, and from about four days of work, it looks like this (though most of the work has been on the mechanics, which are fully functional but sadly impossible to show in a screenshot; I've only just started on making it look like anything):

I'll explain more soon, but basically you use those buttons on the right to sing different notes, to match a melody the other person has just played to you. I keep wanting to play it again and again, myself! I'm spending more time doing that than actually working on it... which I suppose isn't a bad thing? Hopefully other people would want to play it in a similar way.

I also composed some music this year. Not much, especially compared to the few years after I just got started composing and was active making Flash games and the soundtracks for them, but more than the past few years. I still feel like I'm getting back into it. I don't know whether what I've composed is of interest to anyone since it's not from anything, and as such lacks the nostalgic link that would bring, but I'm pleased with it. I've been listening to my recent 'ramble' pieces back-to-back pretty much every day when I work, and they help me concentrate. That's the whole reason I made them, so I'm glad they're working out in that way. (I enjoy them a lot not so much because they're 'good' music, but because they're my music.)

You can find those on my largely-neglected ∞ Soundcloud page ∞.

I've composed another ramble since then, but I was quite out of it when I did so - it's the first and only thing I've composed since the surgery - so maybe it's even less coherent than the other ones, and I'm unsure whether to upload it or not. Maybe I will? Maybe I won't?! Who can say!!!

But yes. That was 2018. I'm not going to include the big Summary of Art I did, with thumbnails for each month, but here's a summary of the year as six snapshots, which I'll use for the preview so I suppose you've seen it already:

I'm quite eager to get back to working on this "Sindrel Song" idea, so I'll be spending the fading embers of this year doing that, rather than going out and drugging my mind into a stupor, as is the typical tradition.

I hope that you feel satisfied with how your 2018 went though, and that you have a wonderful New Year's celebration! Or that you already did if you're reading this after doing that! I got pleasure out of writing this, so I'm content.