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So What Now? (Greedy Unity, Life Milestones, Alien Mummies, Etc)

1 year ago2,380 words

Some noteworthy things have happened in the news recently! Not much has happened in my own life, though, due to a combination of taking time off, not being happy with where I am, and not knowing where I should go.

I've essentially been on holiday for the past couple of weeks. I've felt much better than I have in ages, though I know that's because I've been avoiding pretty much everything I find stressful, just sinking into personal creative projects, which I obviously can't do forever. I have at least had the urge to get back to my game projects.

But as you may or may not have heard, there's some stuff related to Unity - the engine I make games in these days - in the news currently. They want to charge developers a small amount for everyone who installs - not just buys - a game made with their engine, retroactively too. Which seems completely absurd. I can only hope that it's an example of what's called the ∞ Door-In-The-Face technique ∞ (eg asking for $1000, then when denied, asking for the comparatively reasonable $100 instead, which was what you actually wanted in the first place), and that their less-evil intentions will become clear soon. But who knows. It'd hardly be the first time greed brought something wonderful to ruin.

It only applies to games making over $200,000, which my only Unity game, Memody: Sindrel Song, falls far short of. Though the games I've been working on recently (Atonal Dreams, Dreamons) are made in Unity and I'd hope they wouldn't do as poorly. If Unity were to structure its pricing like this, achieving success would be something I'd fear rather than something I'd hope for (though that's the case anyway, due to past experiences with drawing attention to myself and having to deal with dangerous people).

I have no plans to change engines; I'm in too deep, and honestly I can't be bothered learning something new and transferring everything over. But I'm concerned that Unity might end up going the way of Flash, and I'll be forced to if I want to have any hope of making anything releasable.

Part of me wonders whether this is a sign that my recent doubts about what I'm even doing with my life are worth taking more seriously...



The reason I took time off these past couple of weeks was because my parents were away on holiday. While they were gone, I felt like this huge weight had lifted, like I was an actual person instead of some prisoner kept in a cage, or something.

I really need to move out. I'm a 35-year-old man! This isn't where I expected myself to be at this age at all! But it's not as if a change is something I can trivially make.

I had my third session with my counsellor a couple of days ago, and most of what I talked about was how lost and stuck I feel. There's this analogy that keeps coming to mind of how our lives might be like tables, supported by legs, and for most people, they have enough legs that if one - or even two - were to break, the table would still remain standing while those missing legs were rebuilt. But my table has no legs at all. Something like that.

There are three - or maybe four - key life milestones that ostensibly most people achieve - at least in some initial form - in their early twenties:

- Having your own living space
- Having a job
- Being in a romantic relationship
- Owning a car (and knowing how to drive it)

I've achieved none of those. I'm lucky to not be homeless, but I'm completely dependent on my parents currently, and they won't be around forever. One random accident or unexpected health crisis and I'm completely buggered (though I suppose any of us could be hit by lightning or whatever, regardless of current security).

(I did some googling to see if there was some established list of milestones of adulthood, and found ∞ this ∞, which suggests they're:

1) having a full-time job,
2) being financially independent,
3) living on their own,
4) getting married, and
5) having a child

(it also talks about people these days achieving them later than usual, but considers 25 the old/late age, which was a decade ago for me). The job + financial independence and marriage + children pairs are conflated in my mind, and being able to drive seems significant in its own right.)

I feel like moving out would benefit me mentally, but I have no stable income to pay for it. I'm also isolated, so I worry about something happening (eg a health issue related to my brain cancer) and being all alone without any support. I also don't know where to move to, because there's nowhere in particular I either want or have to live.

For money, would I have to get a job? I've never had a job, and don't even know what I'd be able to do, in terms of both skills and mental health issues. I'd rather just try and build on the meagre income I already have from creative work, but much of my time recently has been wondering about what exactly I can do that people would even want to support me for. As much as I like making games, they just take so damn long. I have other ideas, but... that's a whole post in itself, I suppose.

People say you should find friends before even thinking about a romantic relationship. But at this age, people are all so busy with their partners that they often don't have time for friend stuff. Plus there are things like sex and emotional intimacy which friends can't provide. I'm aware that I'd need to work on myself before I'd be worth wanting as a partner. But I also feel that having a partner would help motivate me to work on myself. The ideal would be to find someone similarly mentally ill so then we could support one another with genuine understanding as we try to climb out of the pit together. But I'm aware that's idealistic.

The biggest issue for me is just meeting people at all, though. It's not that I socially stumble or get rejected or anything. I just don't encounter people in the first place. Because where would I? Where does anyone? Dating apps are worse than worthless for men like me.

I talked about all this with my counsellor, and conveniently, the mental health organisation she's a part of is also looking to start some group meetup things in the near future (they were actually enquiring about using the community hall right next to my house for them, meaning it'd be literally next door if they did choose it). I asked about the ages of the people who are likely to attend, though, and was given the diplomatic answer "there's a real mix".

I'm getting a lot of deja vu. In the few years following the release of MARDEK 3, while I was desperately trying to get away from the Fig Hunter drama, I saw a counsellor (through this same organisation) for the first time, and we talked about similar things. She also suggested some meetup groups, and when I asked how old the people at them might be, she gave the same answer ("a mix"). When I actually went, I was decades younger than the other people there, who were mostly women aged 50+ who talked about their husbands and children.

It's so frustrating how much of how our lives go is decided entirely by random chance. People speak as if anyone who tries hard will succeed, and anyone who's not succeeding just isn't trying hard enough, but that seems so naive, simplistic, idealistic. Something I think about a lot is how at uni, none of the people I was randomly assigned as neighbours in my three years spent in the halls of residence were compatible enough with me to become even friends. For a couple of the years, most of them were Chinese students who just talked to one another in their own language. But one of the people I met in third year is currently living with a guy - her boyfriend - who just happened to be randomly assigned a room next to her in halls.

It's like whenever you read about someone rich and/or famous, chances are their parents were already one or both of those things.

Anyway, I'm rambling. My less-than-wonderful place in life consumes most of my thoughts these days, as I get older and older and further and further behind similar-aged peers. Makes it difficult to focus on making silly games alone in my bedroom, and I crave change, growth, to become an actual adult, and then I feel so overwhelmed by how I have to start basically from scratch and I don't know which angle to take or even how.

This is hardly the first blog post I've written about it!!

I wish I just had one single thing I could or should focus on, with everything else being peripheral, mostly irrelevant. But I feel like I have to do everything at once, and end up getting nowhere.

I feel like I'm making tiny bits of progress via this counselling, but the sessions are so brief and so spread out, so there are these long periods of feeling lost in between.

I'll need to spend some time next week just figuring out what to even do with my time. I have some ideas, but... we'll see.



A couple of other things happened in the news over the past few days:


A while back, there was a US congressional hearing about UFOs/UAPs, where three highly-ranked military guys talked about their experiences interacting with them, or that some secret group is in possession of crashed alien craft. I - and many others - hoped it might lead somewhere quickly! Not yet, disappointingly.

Recently, there was a NASA hearing about something similar, but I know much less about it. They seemed dismissive and mocking about the previous hearing - NASA's director hadn't even seen the hearing and didn't know about the key details - to the frustration of the people over on the UFO-related subreddits.

There was also something in Mexico that was compared to the US hearings - as if it, too, was being held by the government, though I've seen people saying that it wasn't and it's an inaccurate comparison - in which some mummies of alleged aliens were revealed, with scientists claiming they'd run a bunch of tests that showed they were actually aliens. The whole thing seems like a farce to me, with far too many holes (the main guy presenting them is a known hoaxer, he made the same claim with the same mummies in 2017 where they were found to be fakes, the skeletons are made up of bones that match human children and animals and are arranged haphazardly in a way that makes no anatomical sense, they're picked up and presented like dolls rather than delicate ancient artefacts, they're all in exactly the same rigid pose, etc; my guess is they're something like the ∞ Fiji mermaid ∞, but... why?). I am, however, very open to being proven wrong here, though I'd be surprised. I just hope things like this don't undo any progress away from ridicule that the whole UFO topic has made in recent years.


Another thing is that Russel Brand - who, for a while several years ago, based his comedy act around what a lecherous sex pest he was - is being accused of being a lecherous sex pest. Shocker. I've personally found his transformation from that to spiritual YouTube guru (who speaks about a lot of things I'm personally interested in) bizarrely fascinating, so I'll be curious to see how he deals with these accusations as his current persona. I'd like to believe he's grown and changed.



Oh, also: I spent much of the past couple of weeks making a fair bit of stuff, just for myself rather than for an audience. It's how I improve my mood. I wanted to play games too, but kept putting it off because I hoped I'd write a blog post about the last one I played, the FFVII Remake... though that never happened!

I did however start playing the original Tomb Raider on a whim a handful of days ago. It's one of the first games I played, as a child, and holds a lot of nostalgia for me. I know I shoud be playing other indie games, but when I do that I just compare and analyse whereas these familiar-ish old things are more like an escape from it all.

I was hoping it'd inspire me in a couple of ways, though: for one, I thought playing games that inspired me to make them in the first place might bring back some of those old feelings, but I also hoped I might be inspired to finally get around to porting my old games to Steam (which might evoke those feelings in others), like I've been intending to do for ages.

Has it motivated me to do that? Ehhh... I mean, I want to have it done, but the thought of actually doing it - by digging through and trying to figure out ancient code - is still an obstacle. (Plus I doubt they'll sell more than a handful of copies, if that.) I really need to just try and ram through it, though. It's been hanging over me for years at this point.

I also started playing the Pokemon Violet DLC. Teal's my favourite colour! I don't get excited by old Pokemon, and I don't like battling trainers with my overpowered endgame team when they're using a single level-50-something first stage early-game Pokemon. The mechanics have been making me think about my own games a lot, though.

Especially Dreamons, which I'm really eager to get back to. Maybe I'll write a Patreon post about some new ideas I've had for that sometime soon!