I got back to this side project last week! Now I'm planning to focus it around an 'evil' council not unlike MARDEK's Governance de Magi. Also, Unity bug and counselling-related awkwardness.
Bleh, I meant to write this yesterday, but ended up feeling lousy and just playing Tomb Raider II all day instead. Which wasn't even fun! I assumed the original trilogy might have followed a similar pattern to others (eg Crash Bandicoot), where the first was ludicrously difficult and the devs learned afterwards how to make the difficulty more reasonable for the sequels. But no! I only died a few times during the first, but the sequel is what TVTropes calls ∞ Nintendo Hard ∞, just one death and reload after another. Though half the difficulty is just figuring out where I'm even supposed to go! Pfff!
Also, I already wrote ∞ a couple of posts on my Patreon ∞ last week about what I've been working on. Rather than just repeating all the details here, here's a 'summary' (or at least what counts as such for overly verbose me):
∞ I wrote a post a couple of months ago ∞ talking about some ideas for this project - Dreamons - where you'd help six characters travel through their minds to overcome their inner demons. I felt like it could work, maybe, though I can't say my heart was in it. I didn't care about the characters I'd sketched, and the whole point of this project is to make something quicker than Atonal Dreams (though I've been buggering around for so long that that's a bit of a joke now), which that plan probably wouldn't have been.
Now, though, I'm imagining the game taking place in the player's own mind, which is ruled over by an evil council (or whatever) of elemental dreamons, each embodying some common negative belief (eg "I'm ugly and unlovable", "I'm weird and unaccepted").
I like MARDEK's Governance de Magi - as did others, it seemed - and the council of villains is a not-uncommon trope. I wish I'd got further along with MARDEK's development and explored things like members of the GdM (eg Melchior) joining your party, as I intended at some point.
This game's mechanics are about taming your foes to your side, to your beliefs, so I'd be able to scratch that particular itch in a maybe more interesting way.
Essentially, you'd travel through the realms of each of these dreamons in a linear, fixed order (which is much, much easier to write and balance than to give the player free choice about the order). The dreamon would be a boss at the end. When tamed, though, they'd join as a permanent ally, and work with you to convert the remaining dreamons.
All of the dreamons would be made using the pixel faced human models I've written about in this blog before; these are some mockups using mostly pieces I already had (I need to model each piece of hair, clothing, etc separately, and haven't done so for the parts these would actually need to match their concept art).
The player would start as a kind of blank slate, and you'd be able to modify your own appearance - as in, you could change your colours, draw your own face, pixel by pixel - at any time outside of battle. It's your own mind, after all, so why not!
I have other plans for gameplay mechanics, which I talked about somewhat on Patreon, but I feel it'd be a better idea to make a demo to show them off more easily, so I'll likely spend this week trying to do that.
But...
I've written about this Unity bug at least a couple of times before. Essentially, at random (not while doing anything particularly graphically intensive), while working on a Unity project, my screen goes black for a few seconds - or maybe flashes between black and a glitched display - then this error pops up and Unity closes. That'd just be a mild inconvenience if that's all it was, but it seems to leave some lingering issue I don't understand where attempting to shut down the PC just doesn't work- or it's extremely delayed - and I have to do a forced shut down by holding the power button.
It doesn't happen constantly - maybe once a day? - but if it does, it means I have to shut everything down and I'm completely thrown off. It's changed a lot and become a whole lot less severe since I first encountered it - updating things like the graphics driver (which is probably what's crashing) and Windows generally seemed to help - but rather concerningly, the couple of times I experienced it last week didn't cause the freezing issue immediately afterwards, but instead I did a full shut down, turned my PC back on, and then several minutes later the locking issue happened and I had to shut everything down again, after which it was completely fine.
And since I'm not a techy-minded computer guy - despite spending my life in front of one - I don't understand enough about them to make sense of what's happening, how, or what I can do about it.
I've googled it, of course, to no avail. Other people have reported the same issue and the same lack of apparent cause, without any clear solutions.
I thought maybe it might be related to one of my two additional displays (one's an old monitor, the other's a cheapish Chinese (Huion) drawing tablet), and tried disconnecting those, though it made no difference.
Importantly, though, I took time away from games dev for the couple of weeks before the last, but used Unity almost constantly during that time to work on a couple of personal side projects. And I didn't get the issue a single time then, which leads me to believe it's probably related to the project file in some way (though annoyingly none of the error logs I've found give any indication of exactly which bit could be to blame).
The project is a bit of a mess anyway due to all the iterations this project's been through (Belief Battles, Frayth, Beliefrayth, now Dreamons...), and cleaning it up will probably be a good thing all round. So I'll probably just create a fresh project and import all the stuff I need from the old/current one, leaving the stuff I don't need behind. Maybe it'll solve the bug in the process, too.
Annoying having to spend time on that when I'd rather just be making better forward progress, but oh well.
(Oh, and Unity seems to have backpedalled regarding the pricing changes stuff that people in games dev communities were up in arms about; now I think it's not as evil?? But I'm going to continue using Unity either way so I'll just hope it's safe to do so for the immediate future.)
I had another session of counselling (the fifth...? Fourth? Don't know) last Friday, and since I've written about the previous ones in this blog, I might as well include a bit about that here too.
I still felt a lot of anxiety about the trip there, mostly about my body failing me in some embarrassing way while on the bus. This seems to be almost the definition of agoraphobia. I didn't have any anxiety about the session itself.
Well, not at first at least, but it turned awkward! I think I've written previously that this counsellor is a young woman, and of a type of person I'd like to be friends with. She reminds me a LOT of a friend I made while getting my own Psychology degree. My previous counsellors had been older than me, and I was quite naive when I saw them. I'm probably older than this woman, and I've been talking to her as I would a peer rather than an authority figure, partly because I do have my own degree, partly because most conversations I've had in the past few years have been one-on-one essentially mutual counselling sessions with a couple of graduates of the same Psychology course I did, who are also women. I suppose I've been behaving in a way that's become familiar to me.
She's acted uncomfortable when I've asked her questions, though, which I immediately pick up on and back up... only to do the same again minutes later because I ramble without planning, and I'm used to not wanting to dominate the conversation and wanting to give the other person a chance to share. Plus I'm genuinely curious about how a background similar to mine led her to where she is now, in case I want to follow the path myself.
I can't even remember which bit of my blathering led us in this direction, but during the last session, she asked me if I had any interest in her, which from the context I assumed she meant "are you flirting with me, lusting over me, or seeing me as a potential partner?", maybe because she's had clients in the past who have? To which I had to awkwardly stumble out some explanation about how she reminds me of an old friend and I feel we could have got along had we met in another context, but I understand that's not what I'm seeing her for, there's a professional distance between us, if you strip down for a doctor you don't expect them to strip for you too, etc.
She probably understood, but it just left me feeling miserable afterwards, like she'd turned me down before I even made a move (not that I was even intending to). Because I'm just that repulsive. And it made me doubt my own communication style, which I thought was friendly and easy to work with but which maybe came across as creepy and even predatory instead (which I worry about a lot since Reddit's full of posts by women portraying men that way, and men upset about being seen that way by women).
When I got home, I googled something like "attraction to therapist reddit", and found a bunch of people talking about how it's common to develop feelings for someone during what are really rather intimate sessions; a lot of people reported having admitted to their own therapist that they were interested in them. But so many of the comments were about sexual interest, talking about how they masturbated to their therapist or found them sexually attractive or the crass acts they'd dreamed of doing with or to them.
I can honestly say I haven't thought about my counsellor in that way at all!
But then it made me wonder (as someone with an interest in Psychology) what she's like outside her professional role. My one uni friend who calls me every week or so is training to become a counsellor, and she slept around in uni and talks a lot about sex and attraction. The person this counsellor reminds me of had sex-related trauma from before I knew her, and talked about sex all the time.
Maybe my counsellor was disappointed that I didn't say I wanted to bend her over a-
Urgh, the whole idea of sex at all - and especially me, unfit troglodyte that I am, taking part in it - just fills me with disgust these days though. A coping mechanism for not getting any, I suppose.
...Wasn't I talking about the silly game I'm making? How many other indie devs go on about their sex lives - or lack thereof - in their dev posts and videos?? All of them, I bet, and it's completely normal, because if there's one thing I definitely am, it's completely normal.
Anyway, I was going to counselling to try and address some of the anxiety and depression issues, and I didn't really want to have to be thinking about things like this!
I feel like I need to work through it next time I see her, now, but annoyingly I won't be able to next week because I'll be going for a yearly brain scan instead. Which will be fun. Maybe they'll find that the cancer's back and my life is over. It's always a possibility, otherwise they wouldn't do the scans. Ugh.
But for now I'll try to remake this project and hope it doesn't crash!!
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