PERSONAL

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Looking Back at 2019

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago3,442 words

As Old Father Time wraps his Chrono Dagger +4 rather roughly around 2019's frail and withered neck, breathing heavily behind its ear and savouring the sobs as he gets ready to lacerate its bulging jugular, I feel maniacally compelled to look back on how poorly I've managed to Live My Best Life during the preceding dozen months. I've made things! I released a thing even! It was not a success! I've started on something that'll be big, you guys, just you wait and see, for real, you gotta believe me, guys!!

I just read through ∞ the post I wrote this time last year, reviewing how viciously 2018 had ravaged my tender, yielding spirit ∞. I wrote a lot about my personal situation there, particularly coming to terms with being alone, never finding a partner or getting a typical job. A lot of that's been on my mind all this year, in much the same ways. No major outlook shifts or anything. There are times when depression spikes and the loneliness really hurts, but for the most part I've come to terms with the solitude and feel mostly peaceful about it. It's not the best situation obviously, but it's the hand I've been dealt, and accepting it is at least much better than torturing myself over what I don't have.

I'm still tormented every day though by a lot of the same thoughts I wrote about at the start of that post... People and events from university, which ended mid-way through last year; feels like a lifetime ago now, yet also like just yesterday. I wonder if the guilt will ever calm down, even a bit. I'd very much like to talk things out with the people involved, but I also understand that "cutting out the toxic people in your life" is considered good advice, commonly given, so as the 'toxic person' in the situation, all I can do is try to cope alone, somehow. I wonder if I'll be thinking about those things for the rest of my life.

(I had a dream about that last night actually, meeting up with this person randomly on the street, and rather than being met with disgust and ignored, I found out she was just as guilty and wanted to talk it out openly and compassionately. Just seeing her willingness to do that felt like an enormous weight had lifted. It felt wonderful, but I suppose it's no less unrealistic than the dreams where I can fly. Sad, I know.)

However long that might be! (The rest of my life, I mean, since I interrupted my flow with an edited-in remark. How annoying!!) It's strange to think that I was still having treatment for my brain tumour earlier this year; the radiotherapy ended in January. That was followed by a whole lot of fatigue which is still with me, though less so, probably due to factors beyond the cancer like depression and poor lifestyle. I'm still trying to figure out how to live productively around that. The last checkup showed the remnants of the tumour were stable, and while the literature says there's a high chance of this kind of tumour recurring, I was told to live and plan my future as if it won't, so that's what I've been trying to do.

In the 2018 post, I wrote about several creative projects I explored briefly and then abandoned, since it was just a hobby then as I tried to focus on Psychology as a career direction. I suppose the biggest difference this year has been deciding to try (again) to make a career of games development, sticking with projects to completion... or at least intending to, though it's been complicated.

I spent the first half of the year working on Sindrel Song, and I actually finished it! Wow, gasp. It was a lot later that I actually released it on Steam, though; that was actually less than a month ago. I'd say that figuring out the whole release process and getting at least a vague idea of the right state of mind I need to be in has been the biggest lesson of the year, and I'll be building upon that next year to hopefully start being more professional about all this. I suppose I assumed things would just work out without any marketing effort on my part, like with my Flash games, but actually going through the process and seeing that's very much not the case is more motivating than any imagined scenarios or abstract talk about the value of promotion could ever be.

I've bounced around between projects during the second half of the year, sort of, but it's more like I've been laying groundwork for what I intend to spend next year on.

So far, Sindrel Song's earned a massive ~$800 in sales on Steam, plus ~$200 on Kartridge earlier in the year. My other form of meagre income, my dwindling website advert revenue, totals around $1000 since January this year. I've also got occasional sales from my soundtracks on Bandcamp (I should upload more of those...), so I'd say my total earnings for 2018 are something like $2200.

That's hardly an income. But alas, the artist's path is a difficult one~! Or something. My biggest hope for next year is to earn enough that I can feel some sense of security, and get my own place after lingering in my parents' house since the brain surgery ages ago... but I'll write about my plans for all that in the next post, probably tomorrow or the day after.

I am grateful to my mother and step-dad, though. I know it's sad and I'm a loser and all that for living with them at this age, but they've let me live here rent-free while recovering from surgery, and they're both supportive, both of them have actually said they like me being here, so it's not as if I'm leeching off them despite their protests or anything. I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing if not for that support, since there's so little security or certainty of success with this. I just hope I can pay it back eventually.

For now, I'll go through each month of this year, like I did with last year's post!

January

I first mentioned Sindrel Song right at the end of the 2018 post:



Already almost finished!! Funny.

I have blog posts about the game from January, and towards the end of the month I already had a video:



It's interesting seeing how much of the final game is already there, and how many features that seem so crucial and obvious to me now aren't there yet! (What's with the weird darkness around the eyes?)

It seems from that post that I'd already composed most of the music for the game in January. The development wasn't a smooth progression at all; there was this initial huge explosion of great productivity, followed by dwindling returns during the following months. It always seems to be that way. I suppose it's like how with a painting, you can get the broad-strokes big picture down in a few minutes, but then spend hours and hours refining it with intricate details (well, a good painter can; I can't be bothered myself).

February

This month seems to have been dominated by Sindrel Song again. I made models for all the characters, derived from base models I made mid-2018:



These didn't take very long at all (largely because the shared bases were already made), and remained essentially unchanged throughout development. The main character at this point was called Glimmer; Memody didn't exist at this point. The game seems to have been mostly unchanged since January, though I'd added some clearer visual indicators and other minor additions. I was using ugly temporary painted backgrounds, and all the colours seem a bit off, looking back:



My websites also had some technical issues right around my 31st birthday (jolly times). I think it was some glitch rather than malice, but whatever it was, it led to a complete restructuring of my sites and the taking down of previously-neglected-but-still-there ones like Fig Hunter and the old Alora Fane community.

March

March seems to have been a bit of a slump; I'd started experimenting with 3D backgrounds, but it doesn't look like I achieved much at all throughout the month? I seem to have been caught in a spiral of creative uncertainty, doubt, and insecurity, exploring too many possibilities and bloating things more than they needed to be. I added features that were later drastically reduced or even removed (such as more detailed lore section). This is what I'm trying to avoid with my MARDEK Reimagining by planning it thoroughly before starting working on it.

April

Sindrel Song's development was plagued by anxiety about how people might end up perceiving it. Were certain themes or visuals inappropriate?? Would people criticise it - and by proxy me - and would I end up with a terrible reputation because of it?? It all stems from the terrible mental issues that have controlled my life. My blog posts from this month seem to explore multiple facets of this fear. Great. I did however decide to remake the main character as Memody, and to use her name as the game's too.

May

Sindrel Song Beta testing began here!! The game was in its almost final form, though I changed a lot based on feedback. Lots of insecurity in the blog posts again. I'm very grateful to the people who helped out with the testing!

June

More of the same: Sindrel Song testing, insecure blog posts. I also seem to have been planning the release more properly at this point. I'd added features like changeable outfits and redesigned Vivace too.

July

Again, more insecure blog posts and Sindrel Song stuff this month. I made the trailer, and the game was essentially in its finished form, just over six months since starting (and with a whole lot of severe fatigue getting in the way constantly).



I also began turning my attention towards my next project here. I experimented with a couple of ideas. One was a concept involving the Varnyn race that probably would have been just as nichey and unsuccessful as Sindrel Song. I drew some concept art, including this:



On a whim, I also tried to make a tile-based environment system similar to my old games, though I quickly abandoned it as a dead end... until several months later, anyway. I posted a few of these gifs on Twitter:

August

Some fairly significant things happened this month. I started working on Belief, which was intended to be a retelling of the MARDEK story with nonviolent socially-oriented 'battle' mechanics. I planned the three major protagonists, who were inspired by Mardek, Deugan, and Emeela from MARDEK. I also planned the Lucen Alora Fane race, who are now set to play a major role in the MARDEK Reimagining.



I also made the basic 3D model I intended to use for the characters, which is the same one I'll be using for the MARDEK Reimagining, most likely.



The game didn't look like much at this point, though I'd already got a working 'battle' system. I liked the emoting faces, as a concept, though these naked mannequin base models just look creepy. I also reduced the size of the eyes later, apparently.



I also released Sindrel Song on Kartridge this month! I learned though that the platform was smaller than anticipated... or at least that's what I though at the time, though it's not as if it got much more attention on Steam. So maybe it was more a case of it not being a very interesting game to the majority of people, or bad (or rather nonexistent) marketing, or both, or all kinds of reasons. I learned a lot from the process, but honestly hurt a lot too since I'd been mentally preparing myself for a much larger response. I suppose that's what happens when you hide away in a cave for years: the return is less triumphant and more unnoticed.

September

This month, I started preparing for a Steam release of Sindrel Song, hoping it'd be much larger than the Kartridge one. But I felt I had a lot to learn - and a lot of mental preparation to do - before I could get to that point. I also started seriously considering returning to MARDEK here, and most of my blog posts are about the various ways I might go about doing that.

I wanted to make a lot of changes, including incorporating a nonviolent 'battle' system like the ones I've been playing around with for the past few years, but there was resistance, and a lot of frustration on my part about being trapped into something I really didn't want to do. I revisited the origins of the story by replaying and recording a video of ∞ a Neverwinter Nights module I made as a teenager ∞, and ∞ Taming Dreams ∞, both attempts to show that the story was always an iterative thing to me, rather than one sacred 'pure' version that should remain untouched.

As a kind of compromise, I explored an idea called "ROHOPH", where characters could convert opponents, or 'turn their dark to light' or something using glowing weapons. I only spent a few days on it though, and it didn't come from a place of stable planning at all; I was rather lost, just playing with ideas, feeling torn between what I wanted and what I felt other people wanted from me.



I'd also got to this point with Belief (this is a really long gif):



I was trying to use a non-tile-based field system, I'd made a couple of character models, and I was quite pleased with the comical outcomes of the psychological interactions (in this case, the Boyfriend's Girlfriend getting jealous when he Flirts with another girl).

I'd started playing around with making the "Governance de Magi" into "The Magisterium", who were Lucen with a glowing third eye to show their enlightenment, and a pair of horns that explained the shape of the hood they wore. This was planned for Belief, though I wasn't sure at this point how to combine that with MARDEK.

October

I talked about UFOs (amusing) and restructured this site, combining together Alora Fane and the Taming the Mind blog and adding an account system. I did more work on Belief, most notably making models for the two protagonists, Lileah and Salvia (as she was intended to be then).



As Belief was then intended to be a sort-of retelling of MARDEK, but with renamed characters, I came up with this Rohoph stand-in, called Dharma:



This also marked a year since I had brain surgery... Strange thought. I still seem to be mostly free of crippling mental defects, other than the fairly serious ones I already had anyway.

November

In November, I was hit by a huge wave of productivity, and did enough work on Belief to have a (20-minute-long!) video demo.



I still really like that and don't consider the game abandoned at all. However, the response to it was lukewarm, hardly the excitement and enthusiasm I'd hoped for. I thought about how people used to be much more interested in my games back in the day, and wondered whether I could re-release my old ones to finally earn a bit of money from them.

I discovered that it was more possible than I thought to open the old development files of my games (after quite a lot of hassle getting everything set up, anyway), and got excited about the idea of re-releasing them in some format. I began playing through them, starting with Clarence's Big Chance, since it lacked the emotional weight and enormous size of MARDEK. I wrote a post about that which I've still not added here, since I felt I should wait until the whole Christmas/New Year period was over before making the game available. I'm aiming to do that in January or February.



At the very end of the month, I wondered whether to do a MARDEK Re-release AND a Remake, to hopefully appease people who wanted the game with no changes, and my own desire to make another revised draft using all I've learned in the years since then.

December

I finally actually replayed MARDEK, for the first time in many years. And to my great surprise, I really enjoyed it! I came to better understand other people's feelings about it, and was hungry for a continuation myself. My desire to re-release it increased - though I felt doing that during the Christmas period would be a bad idea - and I felt more than ever that I needed to be careful about how I tackled the Reimagining.



I also released Sindrel Song on Steam, so that's a big thing, though I gave it less attention than I really should have since my attention had been focused towards these MARDEK thoughts. I learned a lot from the process.

I've spent most of December on planning the MARDEK Remagining's story, and I've done a whole lot of that! I'm intending to make two trilogies, the first being three relatively short Belief chapters using the nonviolent converting people system, and the other three - which I'd probably make first - would be a sequel to that, based around MARDEK's plot. I've written about this in other posts.

I've drawn a lot of concept art - more drawing than I've done all year - and have designs for all the major characters, though I've decided to reveal them gradually to build up hype.



The 2018 review post ended with a bit of excitement about my then-new project, Sindrel Song, including a screenshot of it in its crudest, earliest form. In a similar vein, here's a gif of a gameplay mechanics experiment for the MARDEK Reimagining - or "Divine Dreams", as it might end up being called - that I started a couple of days ago and have spent a few hours on:



It's just a random idea I was curious to play around with rather than something I'm certain I'll go with. I'll talk about that more soon!



I mentioned at the end of the 2018 post that I'd got back into composing music, and that's been true for this year, too. I have 85 compositions from this year; not all of them are good or even finished, but there are a few that I really quite like. A couple are piano pieces which are the first of my compositions I can actually comfortably play, which is a big thing for me, and I've been improving my mediocre piano-playing skills using various methods too, though that's not very interesting to write or read about really.

I've never released any of these musics publicly because I don't know if there'd be any interest, but I might upload some somewhere at some point for the one and a half people who might listen to them for 20 seconds before literally vomiting and going back to listening to Billie Eilish, whose music is apparently popular and which I do not like at all, gods what is wrong with people, and so on.





All in all, it could be a worse year, I suppose... I mean, I'm still trying to figure a lot of stuff out, but I feel more like I have a direction than I did before, so that's something. I'll write a New Year's post with my plans and hopes for how I might build on what I've started this year during the next. Hopefully in next year's review post, I'll have achieved even more!

I hope that the year's been kind to you, whoever you are reading this, and that you feel you've grown and achieved something you're proud of, however small or large it might be!