PERSONAL

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What am I even doing with my time?

1 year ago2,099 words

Maybe I should do this instead??

I just wrote ∞ a blog post ∞ yesterday about how I could work on Dreamons for a bit, essentially a Pokemon clone, but... I don't know. I wrote that largely out of the 'need' to write a weekend update despite having nothing to show, without thinking it through as much as I should have.

It must be nice to have a job where you go in every day, do some assigned tasks, then go home, and everything's compartmentalised mentally - 'work' and 'time off' are separate - and you always know what you have to do because you just do what you're told. School was like that, though I don't know how many jobs are. Maybe I'm overestimating how rigid and determined-by-others work life is for the majority due to my lack of experience.

What I do isn't like that though. I have to figure out what to spend any given day working on, and some days I'm much better at that than others.

I miss the days when I'd just get up and work on Atonal Dreams all day. I had a direction, and I mostly knew exactly what I had to do. The issue is that I got to the point where I knew I should do at least some promotion for it, and get strangers playing a demo to determine whether I needed to make any major changes, but... obviously I've been putting that off, and I feel I can't/shouldn't do any more work on it until I push through that.

And I'm struggling to do so because of the trauma from the negative experiences of running Fig Hunter (and other communities I built up) in the past, as I've written about many times before. Not just enduring the bombardment of snarky sniping or outright abuse, but the more terrifying, real-world-consequences malice of a few deranged individuals.

I've been making some efforts to try and break through the barriers I've built up on my own. It used to be that the thought of posting on Reddit at all seemed impossible for me, but I'm at the point now where I can post in some mental health subs without too much distress (though it's never easy). That's something.

But I was hoping that getting mental health treatment again - counselling - would help speed things up. I've written a lot about the long process I've been going through to get to that point, which has mostly just thrown me off and frustrated me rather than actually helping address the real issues.

I mean, the people I've been seeing - who are supposed to be helping me - are in their fifties or sixties, who grew up in a different world, who don't get any of the online interaction stuff or how I'd even want to make a living rooted in the digital domain. They just want to push me into employment of a kind they can understand, that they're used to. Working behind some desk or counter in the Real World or whatever. They're probably used to dealing with 'ordinary' people whose issues are related to stress from working mundane jobs and being in average relationships with underlying anxiety issues they've always been too busy to try to understand.

I keep wondering whether to post in some indie dev community asking whether anyone else is making games (especially alone) due to mental illness, and whether - and how - they've dealt with dark feedback... but the fear of being bombarded with abuse - which I recognise is probably not realistic - means I keep putting that off too.

Again, talking with a counsellor would help. Maybe.

I've actually been getting long phone calls from a friend at least once a week. We talk mostly about mental health stuff, and I've mentioned all this to her, but... Shouldn't that be helping? I don't know if it is though. Maybe it's because they're two-way conversations... or more like she spends most of them venting about her boyfriend troubles, so any uplifting is just outweighed by the dumping on of weight... or something like that. Whereas with a counsellor it'd be entirely focused on me.

I'm still waiting for an email from a counselling service I've contacted (or rather, I already got one asking for a good time they could call me, I replied with some times, now I'm waiting for a reply to that, or a call). So I can't do anything there other than wait. Mental health treatment is far from instant.



I've been thrown off by all that for weeks now, months... though I suppose I've been generally in a state of panic/reluctance for even longer, trying to think of other things I can work on so then I don't have to face the big scary idea of interacting with an audience or attracting the eyes of demons again. It's definitely a contributing factor to why Atonal Dreams has taken so damn long.

It's interesting looking back through my archive of blog posts. Apparently I first started talking about a project inspired by Alora Fane: Creation ∞ way back in November of 2021 ∞, which is much longer ago than I thought! Time really does fly.

I started a few other projects inspired by that or similar ideas (eg Belief), but I never focused on any for long enough to move beyond the early stages. But I kept going back to the same handful of ideas in some form or another whenever focusing on Atonal Dreams, my 'main project', was proving difficult for one reason or another.

It's worth noting that this is what I did when I worked on MARDEK 3. I barely remember that time of my life, annoyingly, but I think I had huge gaps where I worked on other projects instead of that, all of which remain unfinished. I got there in the end, though.

(Atonal Dreams has probably already taken as long as MARDEK 3, though that was built on the existing MARDEK 1 and 2, which were largely built on top of Deliverance, and Fig Hunter before that, so the actual time spent working things out was longer.)

There seem to be a few gameplay concepts that I keep returning to over and over.

I attempted to make a Pokemon clone right from the very beginning, even before Deliverance, then of course there were Beast Signer and Miasmon, and I incorporated monster taming into Taming Dreams and Atonal Dreams.

I've been experimenting with the psychological turn-based battle system since the planned Clarence RPG sequel thing, and have incorporated them into Taming Dreams, Belief, and now Atonal Dreams.

Recently, I played around with some character creator I made where you can draw pixel faces for human characters, which I like a whole lot.

And I particularly like the idea of dungeons made of a grid of discrete rooms which you can explore 100% and easily navigate, and which don't take too much of a time investment for me to create.

Atonal Dreams incorporates most of these things. I just finished the second half of a playthrough I started the other day, and I'm so deeply proud of it! I really want to finish it.

But... there's just that feeling that I need to get strangers to test it first, that I've poured so much time and effort and soul into it that it'd be devastating if the release process goes badly, and from a design standpoint I'm concerned about having to worry about writing characters in a plot that sufficiently satisfies my perfectionism about such things (which wasn't a thing back when I made MARDEK etc). I've already rewritten scenes a bunch of times.



So my mind keeps wandering to something that has little or no plot, which you can just dive into without much commitment. Something that uses the psychological battle mechanics I've spent so long refining for Atonal Dreams, but without being a part of some grander narrative I have to figure out perfectly. Ideally something where you can play as a custom character using the editor I already have.

In the post I wrote yesterday, I was imagining it being more of a Pokemon clone (or I suppose I had an urge to return to what I had with Miasmon, years ago), but as I lay in bed with insomnia last night, I wondered whether that was too much of a commitment. Even if I already have a lot of monster models made and don't intend to add a ton in the end, it's still a fair bit of effort.



These same thought processes led me back to Belief (V2), a while back, in which you effectively collect human archetypes and battle using silly social skills. Much easier to make, as I only need to make the human base models (and I already have a female one), then the various instances would just use variations of superficial decorations.

So I'm wondering whether to just try to finish off what I've already made of that. Something where:

- You play as a custom character
- With minimal story (no long intro before free-roaming gameplay)
- Where the world is made of one or more hub areas
- From which you enter into discrete levels
- Each a dungeon made of discrete rooms
- And you have to clear a finite number of battles in each one
- Which use silly social/psychological turn-based mechanics
- And you can tame your foes to have them join your party, temporarily or permanently

I've already made all of these parts in some form; I just need to assemble them into something.

I see from looking back through my blog that I've already found myself back at this same mental location many times over the past year or two. Obviously there's something there that I feel I need to work out, get out, but I keep getting tangled in distractions and need reminders to get back on track.

Hopefully I'll hear back from the counsellor soon so I can maybe straighten my thoughts out a bit so things like this don't keep happening as much. My hope for that is that I'll be able to push through some snags that are preventing me from engaging with online communities in general, then maybe once I'm more comfortable with that I can stay on track by talking with other people who also live in the online world (other indie devs, or my discord, or whatever).

For now, maybe I'll just try doing some brainstorming - and playing around with projects I've already made the basic mechanics of - to see if I can figure out some way of turning these into something that I could finish and/or use as a lower-stakes project for practising promotion.

I feel like I repeat myself a lot, and this blog post is a good example of that. But it helps a lot to write things out, every time I become lost or tangled.



I just did a bit of brainstorming while finalising this post, and came up with some ideas that need refining, but which I quite like. I'll likely write a post on ∞ my Patreon ∞ soon about them; it'd help if some of you who support me on there could help to refine the ideas!

The gist would be something like this:

The game begins with you entering an abandoned temple, and encountering something that claims to be a forgotten deity, which you name. You also name the religion and its followers (eg YALORT, Yalortism, Yalortian). It tells you it needs the belief of other people to regain its power.

The temple would have six portals that each lead to islands corresponding to Alora Fane's six elements. Each is essentially a dungeon populated with other people who you'd have the silly social battles with in order to convince them of your religion.

Converts would travel to the temple hub and you'd be able to see them there. As you accumulated more, the deity would grow in power.

I have more specific details (eg battle mechanics) roughly figured out - or in some cases actually working - but that's the gist. I intend for it to be a shorter side project rather than a distraction from Atonal Dreams.

If I can get counselling sooner rather than later, maybe I'll forget about this and get back to Atonal Dreams. But we'll see how it goes.