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MARDEK Re-release, Messages

5 years ago815 words

Hello! Work on the MARDEK Re-release didn't go so well this week, but I have something to work with now. Also, it seems a lot of people are reaching out to people they might not have spoken to in a while during this quarantine, though I'm aware of how much my communication skills have degraded due to isolation.

I hoped to have the MARDEK Re-release working by the end of last week, but sadly that didn't happen. I certainly tried, but just kept hitting walls. It was frustrating, especially after somewhat rushing to get the video done for Divine Dreams and experiencing burnout from that.

I mentioned this in the previous posts, but since people had mentioned that Matt Roszak - the Epic Battle Fantasy creator - had managed to overcome this obscure obstacle, it might be worth reaching out to him to ask him how he did it. While writing the email, though, I thought I'd come up with a solution which I wanted to try first. I did try it, and it didn't work, but I had a different idea for something I could try which was different to the solution I knew he'd come to (I wanted to get a C sharp wrapper working; he'd used AIR). I ended up writing a question on StackOverflow asking about it, not really expecting a response from anyone (largely I did it so then I could at least feel I was doing something other than just quitting for the weekend).

Funnily enough though, it was Matt Roszak who replied to that! I feel a bit awkward now since he probably found out from someone mentioning the whole thing to him (I notice it says he's a new contributor to that site), so I probably should have emailed first/instead, but oh well, at least I have a detailed answer to work with. He mentioned several things I just wouldn't have otherwise known, too. I'll likely email him once I've played around with some things and need more help. Though I feel this is a very obscure problem, his answer being public like that - rather than just in an email to me - might benefit some other people in the future too. So that's good, though I suspect it'll take the whole of next week (at least) for me to figure out how to actually get something working.

Honestly, I'm not looking forward to it. I put off getting MARDEK on Steam for years because of the challenge of porting it, and last week was far less enjoyable than it has been working more smoothly on Divine Dreams. It's nothing about the game itself as a player would see it, just these behind-the-scenes technical hurdles. Hopefully it won't be too long of a process, though, and I can get back to the game I'm actually enjoying making.



I also want to mention again that I've been terrible at replying to messages lately, and want to get around to replying to a few today or over the coming days. So if I reply to something you said two weeks ago, this is why! Sorry about the delay!

I mentioned in the previous post that I had a couple of hours-long video chats with a friend from university, which I've had more of now. They take up a big chunk of time, but it's interesting noticing the change in how the world feels after just getting any kind of human contact, even if it's at a distance. Weirdly, I'm probably getting more of it during this lock-down than I have in all the months that came before it.

I have been noticing how degraded my social skills have become though. My spoken sentences are often stilted or even incoherent, my mind freezes often without any time to pause and think. We get worse at anything if we don't practice it, and social abilities aren't any different. It's why I'm concerned about reaching out to others.

Still, I've been meaning to contact some people I've known in The Real World, but who I haven't talked to in ages, since it seems to be something a lot of people are doing during quarantine. I don't know if anyone will actually reply to me, but I'll see how it goes. Have any of you done this, or had people from your past reaching out to you?

Hopefully you're coping well with the state of the world, anyway! Seems it's driving us all a bit crazy. Makes me wonder if people will develop more sympathy for people isolated in the long term, now they've had a taste of what it does to their own mind.



Oh, I also want to clean up and 'restart' my Patreon this next week, so let's see if I write next week about how I've done that, or if I write excuses about why I didn't!!!