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Looking Back At 2022 - And How it Ended with a Crash

2 years ago2,668 words

So how's your whole Christmas/end-of-year period been? I spent at least a week - starting from Christmas Day - alone, in bed, so depressed I could barely even move. So that was fun!! Have I ever mentioned that I'm mentally ill before? What, in most of the blog posts I've written this year, you say?? I've at least made stuff every month despite it, though slower than I'd like.

I considered writing a post about THE PAAAAIN last weekend, but since all my thoughts were poisoned with bitter misanthropy or withering self-loathing, I thought I'd better wait until I recovered at least a bit. Thankfully the worst of it seems to have passed now - I wouldn't say I'm recovered or anything, but considering it was very probably my lowest mental point in years, anything other than that is an improvement - so I'll at least briefly explore what caused it.

It was the result of a series of consecutive negative hits with no positives to outweigh them:

Both of my brothers came over to spend time with my parents multiple times. I haven't seen either of them in years - and I still haven't, as I hid in my room - and both of them are doing way better than me: they both have partners, jobs, houses, cars, friends, lives, while here I am stuck lingering lonelily (and mentally-ill-ly) in my parents' house after recovering from cancer, unsuccessfully trying to make money from making things on my own. I feel terrible about my life situation in general, and being reminded of how they turned out so much better and 'normal' despite growing in the same poisoned soil - and how they're a source of pride and pleasure for my mum while I'm a source of embarrassment and concern - set off an avalanche of negative thoughts which have been difficult to deal with on top of everything.

This could be cushioned by supportive allies, but I'm isolated. I tried contacting my three 'friends' to wish them a Merry Christmas, but nobody got back to or reached out to me. It hurts.

I've been worried about the promotion aspects of game dev for a long time, and they've flared up over the last several months as I've run out of other tasks to avoid them with. So that's been producing a constant low-grade background anxiety that I've touched on in a lot of recent weekly updates.

I was making baby steps towards tackling the trauma that was largely responsible for that, browsing and commenting on Reddit a bit and stuff. I read that I should make a promotional image (which I'd also need to use for the capsules on Steam), so I spent 3 days working hard on a painting, which I then showed to people - on this site and my Patreon, and to my mum and my friends - but it mostly got critical or no responses; a lack of positive encouragement.

Doubting my abilities, I felt the need to practise my drawing skills a bit, so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone by drawing some concept art for some later Atonal Dreams story stuff. This led to revisions of the six Alora Fane races, which I spent a couple of days excitedly refining. I posted the resulting sketches and ideas on my Patreon, anxiously but with excitement, but they were received in a shockingly negative way which fed into beliefs I have about being unable to connect with people, make things other people like, other people are all sources of pain anyway, etc, so I should just give up...

...And since creativity is everything to me, the root of my identity and primary source of pleasure, meaning, and 'self-esteem', and the pillar supporting that important facet of personality had been badly shaken, I... Well, it all fed into the other stuff and left me feeling defeated, to put it mildly. And I felt I had nobody 'on my side' to turn to to work through it, so I just had to wait for it to fade by itself.

And that's where I've been for the last week or more or however long it's been (I've lost track of the days recently; what even is it now? Saturday??).

Now that most of the family-coming-over stuff has finished, and I've taken some time away from my site and Atonal Dreams, I'm at least able to get up and sit at my computer instead of spending all day in bed, so that's something... but, well, sigh.

My mental health's never not been poor - and I've certainly written about it openly a lot over the years to the point where it's the main thing I ever talk about - but this is the first time since a couple of kind-of suicide attempts shortly after my cancer diagnosis that I've seriously questioned my sanity or whether I have any business even trying to exist in this world at all.

I've been meaning to seek some kind of therapy again for ages, but kept putting it off for one reason or another. The birth of a new year is a perfect opportunity to make some Resolutions, though, and I've spent much of the time I was lying depressed in bed thinking about how I'm going to try to change my life around in 2023. Getting help again will certainly be one of them.

I'll write more about my Resolutions - and whether I've accomplished any of the ones I set for this year - in another post, though. I want to spend the rest of this one looking at what I did in 2022.



My creative work currently stings to look at - brings up imagined disgust or mockery from people more sane/socially-connected than me - making this more challenging than it has been in the past. But making stuff is how I define my time in this life, and I've produced a decent amount of things this year. I'll go through the months, though I made a bunch of things during each one (Atonal Dreams progress, art, music), so I'll only mention one or two visually notable things for each to keep this manageable.

January

The main mechanics of Atonal Dreams were largely in place at this point, though less refined compared to what I have now. I've been mostly just tweaking and revising relatively minor details since then.


Interestingly, though, I only decided on and implemented the fixed-camera rooms here; I thought I'd had that since earlier in development.

I also wrote an excited post this month about the thought of maybe trying to get a job (ha), and another about posting a music album, the 'first' of 2022 (and the only, apparently).

February

More mechanics details tweaking. The most notable change is that I revised the six psychological elements that I'd been using with the Alora Fane setting for years.


I also made this figmon, Dreamon, which I think is the last one I made? I want to make more!

March

More Atonal Dreams tweaking, but the most notable thing this month is that I started on a project called Mentales, based on my old Alora Fane: Creation Flash thing. Within the month, while working on it alongside Atonal Dreams, I went from this:



To this:



I'd also made the beginnings of buildable rooms and a general user-friendly editor layout for 'quests' (or whatever they'd be called), but this pixel-face-drawing editor was the main thing I was particularly proud of. I still am, though I did more with it later in the year.

April

I was trying to decide on what to do with Atonal Dreams' broken world map:



As a replacement, I came up with the idea of these 'flowerbeds':



I also spent a lot of time this month writing another draft of Atonal Dreams' story, for which I drew this concept art of some key characters:

May

I implemented the flowerbeds:



I'd also got to the point with the intro section where the whole map and all the key encounters were there at least in some form:



I spent more time on Mentales this month, and posted a short video showing some basic functionality:

June

I revised the Alora Fane logo this month.

I attempted to port some old Flash games to Steam... but I'd recently got a new computer, which didn't have whatever on my old computer allowed me to get MARDEK working with Windows Forms... so I just gave up.

It seems I had a lull in my mental health. I wrote ∞ a post ∞ talking about struggling to finally face many of the things (promotion etc) that I'd been avoiding for a long time... so I suppose I've been stuck in that phase for much longer than I remembered.



Importantly, this is where I ran the second Atonal Dreams alpha.

I also started work on a side project which used a revised version of the pixel-face people, and which eventually turned into... something which never had a proper title, so I think I referred to it as 'Belief V2' a few times?

July

I worked a bit at addressing feedback from the alpha testers, though nothing majorly notable.

Trying to tackle the promotion/social aspects I'd been putting off due to past trauma and mental issues was really getting to me at this point, and most of my posts this month mention a lack of productivity and focus because of it. It's embarrassing recognising that, after festering for half a year, it resulted in the complete crash this last week rather than something more positive.

I still made stuff, but mostly for personal projects; a way of trying to cope and avoid, I suppose.

August

I started this month by ∞ writing a post about my fears of dealing with fans again ∞, which resonates with recent poisonous thoughts; I don't want to resent people who are drawn to my work, but the stress of dealing with criticism from many people wears down even people far more resilient and better-supported than me.

I wasn't unproductive, though. I added a bunch of particle effects to Atonal Dreams:



I also revised Alora Fane's elements again, to the version I have now:



To play around with whether or not they'd be an improvement - and as a way of avoiding the promotion stuff, probably - I worked on a side project - using the improved pixel-face models I made for a different side project earlier in the year - which went from nothing to this working prototype within the month:

September

I added the revised elements to Atonal Dreams. I also added the shards mechanic.


I also revised the models of Savitr and Pierce slightly.


I revised the in-game tutorials too, which involved making a bunch of these.

I felt like I was mostly finishing off little details with Atonal Dreams, getting it ready for another test.

This month, the queen also died and I got anxious about a middle-of-the-night fire alarm in the community hall adjacent to my house while my parents were away for a week. Surprising; those things feel like they happened forever ago.

October

The third alpha test happened this month; also more recently than feels right in my mind. It was quiet at first, but eventually I did start compiling and addressing changes based on feedback, which were thankfully all relatively minor.

I struggled again with mental issues, this time related to having to wait for weeks after a brain scan to check on the cancer... plus all the promotion stuff that was looming ahead of me, and which I really didn't want to have to face.

I spent a lot of time working on revisions to this website, though they didn't go public until the next month.

November

The revised website went live this month. Again, surprisingly recent.


Using "it's almost Christmas!" as an excuse to myself, I tried to find ways to avoid facing the promotion stuff, like porting Clarence's Big Chance, or making a sequel or something.

December

That's this month. The most notable thing is that I spent 3 days on this artwork that I intended to use to promote Atonal Dreams:



It wasn't as well-received as I'd hoped. I also drew some other concept art that I posted on my Patreon, which I won't include here since that wasn't well-received either.

Mostly though I've obviously been anxious about the promotion stuff. I really do feel like I'm being expected to move back in with a previously abusive parent or ex or something, so I'm just panicking and putting it off for as long as I can even though I know I'll have to face it at some point.

Views on the blog posts have been dwindling, but so too has my productive output, so... fair enough.



It's embarrassing how much mental illness prevents me from doing the things I want to do. I never know whether writing about it so much is something anyone at all would appreciate, or if it only creates some terrible image of some unreliable nutjob or something. At least venting about it here at least keeps me relatively sane. Maybe. Though I'm very aware - as I have been for years - that it probably shouldn't be tangled together with the game dev posts. But it ends up being anyway because my productivity is so tightly tied to how well - or not - I'm doing mentally.

Since I use some tool I made to track my mood constantly (I've written about it a few times), I can see patterns over the long term, as in these sets of pie charts of moods I've recorded:



I compared 2020 and 2021 last year and noticed a trend towards increased negativity. There's not as much of an increase in negative moods between 2021 and 2022 as I'd expected (I think all 18 of the worst ones are from past week or so?), though there is a marked decrease in positive ones.

You can literally see the joy draining out of me as I keep at this.

Next year, I'll need to try to seriously rethink whether I should or even can continue on this path I'm on, which is clearly causing me so much distress. I have some ideas, some intentions. But as I said, I'll write about that in another post.

I'll also review my Resolutions for 2022 when writing new ones for 2023, as that's apparently what I did last year. I'll hopefully write a post about that in a day or two, wellbeing permitting.

I'm finishing writing this about three hours before the new year. Sitting alone in my room, of course; my parents are out at a party with their friends. Feels... I don't know; tired, mostly, since I'd usually be asleep - or getting ready to sleep - about this time. So any incoherence in this post can be blamed on being half asleep. I'll likely stay up until midnight just because this only happens every 365 days, then I'll be knackered tomorrow. Yay.

I hope that if you're reading this in 2023, you had a Happy New Year! (Is that a DEMAND to have an entire happy upcoming year, or more of a reference to the 'New Year' celebration on that night? Eh, I'm half asleep, I don't know. I should post this before 2022 ends.)