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Time Off to Brainstorm and Break Out of My Shell?

3 years ago1,270 words

I'm taking maybe a couple of weeks off Atonal Dreams to do some other stuff, like brainstorming other game ideas or trying to break out of my mental cocoon to socialise online in some small way...

I wrote a while ago about how I was looking into moving out of my parents’ place and finding my own, since I’m 33 and that should have happened over a decade ago. Annoyingly - but probably not surprisingly - it's still not happened yet.

A big part of it not happening was because I was talking with that friend about moving in with her temporarily, and when she - predictably, but still disappointingly - changed her mind about that, I just felt so deflated and didn’t want to think about it for a while. It’s not as if I have some obsession about her in particular as I have with a couple of poor people in the past - her turning down the wonderful offer to share a living space with this weirdo felt more like dropping an ice cream cone than losing an arm - but I have nobody else at all who I could even maybe find a place with, so it was my only option. Now I have no options but to just live alone.

While the only time I ever leave the house these days is to go for brief walks - and I don’t do that as much as I’d like - my parents are always seeing their friends, or going away on little holidays for days at a time. And part of my step-dad’s job involves looking after some community centre thing we live right next to, so when he’s away, that duty falls to me. There’s very little to it - basically I just have to lock and unlock the doors at certain times and put some tables out or away - but I still mildly dread it just because I worry I’ll forget something or there’ll be some kind of crisis I’m neither physically nor mentally equipped to deal with, and I have to be alert all the time so I can't fully relax. But I also hate the thought of being a complete leech - even though if anything my parents keep trying to convince me to not move out - so I’m ‘happy’ my lingering here can be useful to them in some way.

They’ve been planning for months to go on one of their holidays in October, next week. So they’ll be away for a couple of weeks. My mum’s mentioned to me many times that she's worried I’d move out before then so they wouldn’t be able to go away, so that’s the main reason I’ve delayed looking for a place of my own.

I’m thinking though that during that time when they’re away and I’m here alone, I’ll take some time off Atonal Dreams to try and… I don’t know, do something different. There are a bunch of things I want to make but haven’t had the time or energy, and there are some social things I’d like to at least attempt too.

I’ve been working on a new creative project in the evenings, and the difference between working on that and Atonal Dreams is like day and night. I look forward to working on it every day, and can focus without distraction for three consecutive hours, while with AD I have to take regular breaks and I constantly check the clock. It’s always like this with new projects. I wish it lasted for the whole duration! But it never does.

That project’s too experimental to be a profitable game, and I’d rather just keep it to myself rather than inviting judgement and getting stressed about it. The main benefits from it will be skills I can later incorporate into actual game projects - I’ve been learning about a couple of Unity features I never even knew about before - and, well, making things like this is just something I do for fun in the same way others watch stuff, play games, or socialise (I do those too of course - though the latter so rarely these days - but making stuff’s always more satisfying).

I’ve been wondering though whether I could also use this time to brainstorm other games I could potentially make, more quickly than AD… but I’m in the middle of AD and I really I don’t want to give it up, and I’ve done that kind of brainstorming before and it’s not led anywhere. Maybe it’d be worth refining or building on some previous attempts to generate ideas so then I have some to work on when AD’s done, at least. We’ll see.

I’ve also retreated too much into my shell these days, and I keep thinking I should try to break out by engaging with strangers who don’t know anything about me, somewhere. I’ve been looking on the ∞ r/socialanxiety subreddit ∞ - a quick skim through that should give a good idea of the nature of the demons that have pushed me into this pitiable pit - so maybe I’ll post there at some point… though there’s a lot of variety in who posts there. Some guys in their thirties who’ve never held a job or a girl’s hand, uni students who get anxious when their boyfriends say mean things about their work friends…

Mostly though I’m just still scarred from running Fig Hunter - and the other sites I made to try and escape it - after all these years. I absolutely don’t miss waking up every day dreading what drama I’d have to deal with. Every time my phone makes the email sound - mostly for auto-sent notifications these days - I get a jolt of fear about it being someone telling me there’s some drama or damage I need to take a look at… Not that it'd be anything like that when posting anonymously on some random subreddit, but trauma reactions are often irrational. Hopefully I'll push through it, though. We'll see.

I've also seen indie devs talking about how they wish they knew other devs to talk with, to help motivate each other, and a lot of others spoke up about wanting the same thing. There are surely discords etc out there for such things, but if I see a new one forming, I might try to participate in that too... though just typing that out brings forth a flood of thoughts like "but I'll probably just say something wrong or repulsive and make everyone uncomfortable", so I suppose social anxiety is a bigger factor there than I might like to think. Hmm.

Oh well. Maybe I'll think some more over the coming days about some other stuff I could maybe do while I'm taking time off. Like music composition; I really want to do some of that.

Also, I was supposed to have a brain scan on Monday, but I had some kind of stomach bug or something - I think I mentioned this in last week's Weekly Update - so I postponed the appointment by a month or so. So I won't have the thought of getting results from that hanging over me during this break, which is a relief.