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Hospital & Anxiety, Figmon VPet?, Time Management

3 years ago2,352 words

I've got a few things I want talk about in this post: the hospital appointment wasn't as anxiety-inducing as usual; I'm wondering (not for the first time) whether to make a virtual pet mobile app; I'm wondering how to restructure my days to get more done; and a note about computer stuff!

Hospital and Anxiety

I went to the cancer hospital for another scan yesterday. I was surprised by how low my anxiety levels were for the whole thing! I'd even describe myself as feeling and acting 'confident'? I had no problem talking with the staff about anything at all, though I felt so familiar with the place after being there so many times that I felt like an old regular, or something like that. Usually I'll get a surge of anxiety that I have to control while in the scanner, but I didn't even get that this time, and the whole ordeal was over very subjectively quickly. So that's good!

Though it's not as if I've magically recovered from social anxiety. The worst bit was afterwards, when my mind was doing the involuntary and frustrating review of every little detail of my physical and verbal behaviour. Was this little thing I said off-puttingly weird??

Apparently I laugh a lot - or giggle, maybe - which is likely a subconscious submissive behaviour, a way of 'not being a bother' or attempting to be easy to deal with, or something. It's not something I normally notice or think about, and I definitely don't do it consciously, but for whatever reason my mind latched onto it this time as a sure sign I'm weird and everyone I interacted with knew it.

It made me think though about how maybe my behaviour was distinctly odd, but would that actually even matter if I wasn't actively feeling ashamed about that? Many people are 'odd', and I expect the people in a brain cancer hospital deal with a lot of them, but I suppose the difference between people with social anxiety and other oddballs is that the former group turn a critical eye inwards at their own oddness and believe it to be shamefully unacceptable in some way. I suppose a lot of people are just unabashedly odd.

Many people on r/socialanxiety talk about being paralysed by shyness, never speaking, but I suppose my issue has always been that I do talk, I just say odd things which seem to bring about discomfort in others. It's harder to do anything about that because the issue isn't about 'opening up' or 'developing confidence' or 'just getting out there'. Hmm.

One of the nurses who saw to me - did my canula and asked me a series of medical questions they have to ask you twice (like "do you have metal fragments in your eyes?"), etc - seemed awkward. A guy around my age, maybe? That was nice to see, in a way, since I felt like I wasn't the most awkward one in the room, and it also made me aware that awkward people do get jobs. Not something I didn't 'know' already, but seeing something in the realm of real experience is always so much more potent than just contemplating it in the abstract. Or something.

Also, I felt distinctly better overall just from going out for a handful of hours and interacting with people, even if it was just doing hospital procedures and having a talk with my step-dad in the car on the way there and back. Like a pall lifted, or I woke up from a months-long stupor. I need to get out more. I'll be thinking about exactly how; it's easier to say than it is to make actual steps. I was planning to at the very least go out for a walk today, but it was pouring with rain at the time I intended to! Pfft!

Figmon VPet?

As I said, I talked with my step-dad on the way there and back. He usually asks me about how my games are going, since he still clearly hopes I'll earn a ton of cash and he won't have to keep working anymore (he's the sort of person who sees others as pawns who can provide him with things). He's at least ostensibly supportive of me taking time with it and trying to make it work though; he chose the 'risk it all' path over a secure one in the past, and is apparently happy to be here for me as I do the same.

I feel like a disappointment that Atonal Dreams is taking as long as it is, though, and said as much. I also mentioned the severe burnout I've been experiencing. We got talking about shorter things I could make either alongside my main project or as a brief break from it, which is something I've been thinking about myself for a while anyway.

Atonal Dreams is a linear narrative, so I need to finish all of it before releasing it. But for a while I've been wanting to make something that you can sit down and 'just play', something you could do runs of which aren't always the same, or something persistent you'd chip away at over weeks or months, where I could just build the 'gameplay loop', release it, and then continue to update it with new content over time. On the surface it seems like a solution to a lot of the blocks I'm facing... though past experience - and snooping of dev communities - suggests it wouldn't actually play out that way in practice. Still, I'm curious.

I've played around with a few different ideas over the past few months, but one I got talking about with him this time was a return to something I've talked about many times over the years, and loved during my youth: virtual pets!

I used to have several Digimon, these things:



I've written about them a bunch of times, and probably just as many times I've tried to imagine how I'd make something similar myself, without getting anywhere at all with it.

This time, though, I wondered whether I could make something that was essentially a spin-off of Atonal Dreams. That is, a virtual pet where you look after the figmon I've designed for that. I could even reuse the models!

The appeal of Digimon for me was that how you raised it determined which form you ended up with after several days. I loved looking at the growth charts, like this:



Or here's another I found while googling for that, which sheds some light on something I wondered about endlessly as a child:



I don't know what's going on with it since it has stages beyond Ultimate that weren't a part of the original VPet - maybe some fan project or a re-release or something, I'm not curious enough to check - but it shows the criteria for actually getting each form, and they seem so simple. I usually got the ones on the left (other than Airdramon, which was both my favourite and completely elusive to me), and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to consistently get the ones on the right... because overfeeding never occurred to me. I vaguely remember a guy at school asking me to look after his (since apparently I was regarded as an authority on them, or the starter of a fad? Weird memories), which was a Tyrannomon, and wondering how on Earth he managed to evolve it in the first place. (Ah, the days before you could just instantly google these things!)

If I were to make a virtual pet of my own, making it for mobile would be the only sensible course of action. I checked the app store, and there are a bunch of virtual pet apps already - obviously - with some being varyingly-accurate reproductions of the original Digimon or Tamagotchi, or novel attempts at the same retro style, while essentially all the others have very similar cutesy styles and seem so focused on this kind of... how would I describe it... 'mainstream' appeal? The sort of thing that feels like something designed as a lure to manipulate rather than a work of personal passion. Hard to put into words, but maybe you know what I mean? They usually seemed to involve looking after one singular cutesy animal or blob or whatever that didn't appear to change forms over time (or die).

So I don't know if I'd have any hope of getting anything out of attempting one myself. Maybe it'd be too different to what people looking for such things want?

I have no ideas for specifics beyond using Alora Fane figmon, reusing designs from Atonal Dreams, using it as a kind of spin-off. A thing where you can raise a monster over several days, checking on it for moments a day to feed it or whatever, and how you raise it determines what form it evolves into. And there'd be an in-app encyclopedia thing listing which forms you'd ever earned - something the extremely primitive Digimon obviously didn't have - so there was something to gradually aim for. Probably interactive features like ∞ Pokemon-Amie ∞. Just vague ideas at this point, unrefined.

It'd probably be a quick distraction, making something like this, and maybe people would enjoy it? Or maybe people who didn't grow up with VPets wouldn't. And maybe if it or Atonal Dreams earned a little bit of success, it'd also help the other, so it'd be like I'd have two shots at my work taking off?

Or maybe not. I'm just brainstorming.

Would you be remotely interested in a virtual pet mobile app where you look after figmon??

(EDIT: I actually did look it up, and it seems there's a 20th Anniversary re-release version which contains forms from five of the previous versions and has various updated features etc. I wonder whether to get one purely for the sake of satisfying some old childhood desires and to inspire something I'd make myself - they're not hugely expensive - but I also wonder whether I'd even care enough about it! HMM.)

(EDIT 2: Never mind; the 'not prohibitively expensive' one I was looking at was a different version - they're still pumping out new ones, apparently, though I wonder how many people buy them; maybe they're still popular in Japan? - and I can only find the 20th Anniversary one for almost 200 pounds. Oh well!)

Timetable stuff

I think I mentioned recently something about my time-management woes? What I was doing was trying to get in 5 or 6 hours of focused work every day, and I was spending a lot of time exhausted - and burned out recently, of course - and usually failing to achieve those 5 or 6 hours anyway. I wanted to do other stuff like replying to comments, posting on Reddit, or writing blog posts, but never had the time.

So, after talking with other people including my step-dad, I've decided to devote my mornings to doing just 3 focused hours of work on Atonal Dreams, then... that's it for the day. No more.

I know that Western culture stresses that we should all work ourselves to the bone constantly, and if we don't, we're slacking and should be resented for it. Working 15-hour days is a mark of pride, that kind of thing. But it sounds like a whole lot of people just can't manage it, and even if they're 'at work' for 8 hours a day, it doesn't mean they're doing work for that whole duration. I've talked about this a bunch of times.

I'm hoping that if I just try to cram in a lot of work in the mornings and then forget about it entirely after that, I'll actually get more done in the long run than if I tried to work 5+ hours a day on it, and my wellbeing might improve too.

I can't know until I try, but I'm certainly interested in trying because I'm been feeling so terrible lately. So hopefully it'll work out okay!

And if I'm doing that, I've freed up the afternoons for other stuff. I've assigned a block on my timetable just called 'Social', which I'll use to push through things like Reddit reluctance, reply to messages (which I often take ages to do), or eventually maybe go in my Discord and stuff. I'm using it today to write this; I'm not going to dive in the deep end right away. Hopefully in the long run that might have benefits, too.

Then I'll spend some time playing games, and the evenings working on creative stuff, which is currently the highlight of my days that I consistently look forward to.

Oh! I just remembered! Before yesterday's appointment when there was no hope of doing any real work, I organised and made cover art for another music album, the OST for Taming Dreams (which I thought I'd already put up, but apparently not). Hopefully I'll be able to finalise that now that I have time, and the handful of other albums too. Even if nobody's really interested, there'll be a sense of personal satisfaction and release about that for sure.

PC Stuff

I don't have much to say here yet, but I just wanted to say thank you to those of you who left long and detailed comments about what PC I could get! I haven't replied yet, partly because of the lack of time, partly because I wanted to make a decision before doing so but haven't had the chance with the hospital and other stuff in the way, but hopefully I'll have a chance to look into my options in more detail soon and can reply then. It's a big decision which I shouldn't take too lightly, I suppose!

I wish there were far fewer choices - too many can be paralysing - but, well, hopefully I can come to a decision anyway. I'm eager to see the back of all the lag!