DEVELOPMENT

4

786

Horns, Hub, Indecisiveness, Burnout, DAWs?

1 year ago1,145 words

Did some Dreamons work this week, but mostly felt indecisive and burned out. Also, potential Patreon issue, and I should probably learn to use a DAW.

I tried to spend this week working on Dreamons... though I can't say I achieved much. The whole point of this side project was to make something more quickly than I could finish Atonal Dreams, which I could then use to practise promotion (plus I'd also have the satisfaction of having finished something), but I still feel like I'm stuck barely beyond the starting line.

It does still feel like something that'd be easier to complete! But I suppose I'm (still) struggling to decide exactly how to structure it. Should I do ∞ the scenarios thing I wrote about a few weeks ago ∞? Would people complain if the short stories weren't good enough or offensive in some way?? Would I get stuck in some perfectionism loop where I keep tweaking dialogue lines, never satisfied?!?

I miss the days when I'd just have some idea, and then I'd work on it straight away. No refining, no caring about what anyone else might think... Not that that led to a bunch of finished projects though.

I feel like having some waking world hub and dream worlds that you can explore as a customised dream avatar works best with the mechanics and lore concepts. And basing those dream worlds on the six elements I have makes sense too. But the characters I've vaguely come up with for each aren't fleshed-out enough in my mind yet for me to be highly motivated to write their stories. Something like that?

Anyway. This week, I reworked some technical aspects of how characters are handled in the data to work with the revisions. Boring but necessary stuff. I also added some extra customisation features for the character models like horns, and the potential for wings and tails, so they could potentially look more demon- or angel-like:




I thought there could be two characters who are kind of like the trope of a shoulder angel and devil. Maybe the angel could be the leader of the Oneironauts, and the devil could serve as a kind of primary antagonist who appears throughout the psychepelagos. I've got some other ideas for them, though they'd be spoilers. I reworked the title screen to include a concept for the devil character, for some reason:



All very much subject to change though. This pose is just reused from the character creator for the time being.



I also reworked the intro, so that you're greeted by the angel character in the same way the professor greets you at the start of Pokemon games (at least the older ones). The personality quiz would be here, as would be some questions about your sex and race. I'm still deciding how to go about that without offending anyone (if such a thing is even possible).



I spent some time fiddling around with a simple hub area, though I haven't done much with it.



I also wondered whether this hub area could be first-person and menu-based - and you'd have no character model here at all, meaning no need to select your sex or race - with zoomed-in rooms like this... though after experimenting a bit I preferred it working like the other run-around areas.

Mostly, though, I was just feeling burned out and unmotivated. Achieving little, slowly. Maybe I need to focus on something else for a while.



One thing I really should do is get back to the ports of my old Flash games. There's something else that I need to figure out first, but I've been putting it off for ages due to my CRIPPLING MENTAL ISSUES. It's not even a big deal, I'm just paranoid...

Speaking of which, I went in my Discord server on Thursday after being alerted to some issue with Patreon, where people were losing patrons due to cards being incorrectly marked as fraudulent or something; ∞ here's a Reddit thread where people are talking about it ∞. Thankfully I didn't lose many patrons, but if you are one, it might be worth checking that your latest payment went through. Or if your next one doesn't, this'd be why, though hopefully Patreon will have fixed it by then.

I rarely go in my server as I generally avoid all socialising these days, but I stayed a while after that and we talked a bit about my games. I felt moved by how people were still influenced by things I've made! It helped soothe some worries I've been having lately about what I'm doing with my time and life. Memody: Sindrel Song was mentioned fondly, and I intended to replay it myself the next morning, hoping it might rekindle the same inspiration that I had when I made that...

Instead, though, I woke up to my antivirus software flagging one of the Discord PC app's files as malware. I then spent the entire day shaken up by that.

It was probably a false flag anyway, but I just get so paranoid due to past experiences of actually being the victim of malicious people. It's a trauma response, hard to shake off, at least for those of us cursed with a high degree of neuroticism.

Another thing I've been thinking about for a while - and which came up in the Discord server - was how I should really learn how to use a DAW (is it Digital Audio Workstation...?) for improving the quality of my music. I don't really have any interest in that sound production aspect of music - I like considering the arrangement of notes, but the sound of the sound (timbre?), not so much - but I'm aware other people do care about it, and it'd be important to know about if I ever thought about trying to make a career out of music composition.

I wouldn't know where to start, though, so I'll need to just do some research. Do any of you have any thoughts, preferences, suggestions about DAWs to help me get started? Have I asked that before?? Maybe!

So yes. I'll probably spend next week taking a break from Dreamons, and trying to figure out stuff related to the Flash game ports and how to use a DAW. I'll also replay Memody: Sindrel Song!