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On Media Claimed By The Young; Another Eden

9 months ago2,278 words

I’ve actually done a lot of work on Dreamons this week, gasp! Though instead of going into detail about that, here's some rambling about popular creations being most obsessively consumed by the young and impressionable. Also, did you know there's a mobile JRPG made by some of the creators of Chrono Trigger? Plus a brief bit about the loneliness epidemic.

(Pfff, I wrote most of this over the weekend, but my parents are away on yet another of their holidays - I'm 35 and still live at home, I'm embarrassed, I should move out, etc etc - so I've been looking after the high-maintenance dog which is used to sitting downstairs all day and craps on the floor when it's not getting its way. So I've been away from my computer more than I'd like.)

(...And while sitting down to do a final proofread of this before posting it, I managed to focus for exactly 12 minutes - I timed it - before the dog started making a fuss and I had to get up and do something else. That was an hour ago, and I've only just got back to it. Pfff!)

(ANYWAY.)

I'd been feeling burned out about this side project game, Dreamons, but after going a few weeks without touching it (not exactly intentionally), the return has felt exciting and I've achieved a fair bit.




I'd happily talk about what I've done in great detail, but I've been wondering how much anyone might actually care. A big part of the burnout surrounding this project - and games dev in general - comes from the assumption that even if I do actually finish a game, the chances of it making enough money such that the time and effort I've poured into it feels worthwhile are very slim. Most people wouldn't spend a significant chunk of their life on something like a 1% success rate gamble. It's quite insane!

Still, I suppose the creative drive is strong, and I personally have a deeper desire to make 'art' - if the silly games etc I make could be called that - than I have to make money. (Though I wish I made enough of that to just pay the basic bills...)

There's also that side side project I've mentioned a few times but which I've yet to show anything related to. Basically, I've built the structural aspects, but got stuck on the story. The inspiration I had that led to me finally bringing it into being was born of depression, and once that depression lifted, the inspiration for that particular idea faded too.

I've been wondering whether to focus it instead around the dreamon characters from the Dreamons game, so both projects would be feeding into each other (kind of like there'd be a game and an accompanying animated series of sorts).

Since it's probably not clear what this other thing even is, though, I want to at least assemble what I already have into some kind of preview proof-of-concept thing that I'll likely post on my Patreon soon. The only reason I haven't done that already is because I spent all my time last week on the Dreamons game because I was eager and excited to do so!

I looked through some of my previous blog posts about Dreamons, and it seems I haven't really written a clear (and up-to-date) description of what that is, either, and it's been a while since I showed a preview video. So I'll likely spend the next week refining what I have to show a video of that, too.



Speaking of videos, this showed up in my YouTube recommendations the other day:



I've seen hundreds of Steamed Hams edits over the past several years - I suppose it's because I've clicked so many that this was suggested to me, though I'm surprised people are still making them - so that's not why I'm mentioning it. This edit makes fun of young people slang and culture; I suppose the generation after 'Gen Z' (or 'Zoomers') is called Generation Alpha? I've been seeing more and more references to them over the past couple of years. I remember when we Millennials were the younguns the old folks complained about! Time flies. I'm old.

I understand maybe half of the terms used from passively browsing Reddit (mostly via posts making fun of or complaining about them; I had to google 'gyatt', which seems to be more of a TikTok/streaming thing), though what surprised me were the inclusion of Digital Circus and Undertale as if they're staples of the current childrens' culture.

(Also Pizza Tower, which I saw some YouTuber playing once, but I follow him because he often plays indies or games I've never heard of, so I assumed it was obscure. It's got over 44,000 positive reviews on Steam, though. Could anyone have predicted that from looking at it before release? It's all so random, what sticks. Right place, right time, lots of luck, then a snowball effect where people like it because other people liked it... I suppose the same is also true of the bizarre Skibidi Toilet, which I've only seen in passing and which to me looks like some random messing-around that blew up unexpectedly so the creator desperately tried to bottle the lightning.)

(Also, aren't FNAF, Among Us, and Minecraft more younger people things than Undertale?? Or are they all old now too?)

∞ I wrote about Digital Circus a while back ∞, after some animation channels I follow had made videos about it. I saw it through the lens of a creative person admiring the artistic output of other creative people, and was impressed.

But it bothers me that the artwork we create as adults, probably for ourselves and our similarly-aged peers, might instead resonate most with - and get claimed by - an audience of literal children.

MARDEK kind of was. Most of the people who've approached me fondly praising it have such pleasant feelings for it because they discovered it when they were young and more receptive, before they'd been whittled down and embittered by the world.

I remember that bothering me back in the Fig Hunter days. I was about 20, and wanted to attract people around my own age. I had no desire to entertain children.

Seen from another perspective, though, being something really meaningful to developing people whose heads aren't already filled with better media and whose hearts aren't yet poisoned by living in this world, something they obsess over and hold dear, maybe has more value than just being some begrudgingly finished and mostly complained about side note during some weary adult's break from work... maybe?

Though I wouldn't want to interact with an audience of children. I say as if I interact with my audience at all these days! Ehh. I wonder how other creators feel about this kind of thing. If I wasn't such a socially anxious recluse, maybe I'd ask them!



I also got algorithmically recommended these videos looking at the animation of the early Final Fantasies (though the creator devotes more time to discussing the games in general):



Those games were a big inspiration for my own, as I loved them when I was young - though I started with the PlayStation ones as a child and discovered the first six via emulators during my teens - and I've been meaning to revisit them in the hopes of rekindling my motivation for RPG-making... though I keep putting it off because I know I'll actually discover that I don't really enjoy them at all now that I'm older, and all I'll see are issues I was previously blind to.

Just a few days ago, ∞ I wrote a post about the remake of Star Ocean 2 ∞, a JRPG I loved and endlessly replayed during my childhood, and much of my rambling focused on issues and imperfections I didn't notice back then.

Still, watching the videos at least did awaken something in me, and motivated me to work on Dreamons. So there's that.

One of those Final Fantasy animation videos (IV, maybe?) was rather surprisingly sponsored by a mobile game I'd never heard of, called Another Eden, which is apparently made by some of the same team as Chrono Trigger and Cross. Since it was free and I was curious, I've been giving that a go.

(I'd rather have been playing the Super Mario RPG remake, but it's obnoxiously expensive so I've not yet made the plunge.)




It's very tropey and I can't say that I'm hugely impressed. If anything, it feels sad to me that so many years have passed but the content still feels so... vapid. The story is about some young generic anime guy whose young generic anime little sister is kidnapped by the Beast King and you have to roam through forests and caves fighting goblins with your sword to save her. Also the protagonist owns some super-powerful demon-slaying sword of legend and is such a Chosen One or whatever, or so it seems so far. Maybe I'll be surprised if I get further!

It's obviously trying to make good use of the connection to the Chrono games - it also (kind of) starts with a female family member opening your bedroom curtains and remarking about the sunlight, and there's even a festival on in your hometown (though it's immediately forgotten?), you travel through time and explore several distinct eras - though the art for those was by Akira Toriyama, whose style is more distinct (and closer to my own, at least in the sense that he doesn't rely on overly-adorned costumes) than the extremely generic anime style this has gone with.

I also find the battles - which are the old-fashioned random encounter style, surprisingly - frustratingly hollow; all I've had to do so far is press mindlessly press 'Attack' over and over. Especially annoying/disappointing after putting a lot of thought and effort into trying to make Dreamons' battles more interesting.

...Or so my thoughts grumblingly go. As much as I'd like to regard myself as open and curious about other creators' work, as we get older I suppose it's unavoidable that we become more discerning, more critical, harder to please. Would I have responded very differently to this if it was among the first JRPGs I've ever played, and I spent hours filled with bright-tailed, bushy-eyed sproggish enthusiasm lost in its world? No doubt.

(A lot of the lack of interest I have in it largely comes down to not cultural differences, though; things that'd resonate with a Japanese audience due to cultural familiarity (by which I mean things like narrative structures, conversation structure, etc rather than superficial details like mentioning samurai or whatever) don't resonate with me in the same way. I've never been a 'Japan fan' in the way anime lovers tend to be. Not that I have anything against it, to be clear; it's just never really spoken to me in the same way.)



I wrote all that yesterday (Sunday) but got distracted by the dog then got tired and just went to bed before I got around to posting it. I've spent about half of today doing Dreamons work, and the other half doing various chores around the house and adjacent community hall I have to look after while my parents are away and sitting downstairs with the dog while scrolling through Reddit and Facebook. Not what I'd prefer be doing! But I suppose getting away from my computer has been having some positive effects on my mind and general outlook.

One of the videos YouTube's algorithm suggested to me was this:



Which I almost scrapped the rest of this post to talk about instead. But I've already written it all, so I might as well keep it.

It talks about the loneliness epidemic, and how so many of us are becoming increasingly isolated in personalised bubbles. I got thinking about things I've made in the past like websites and games that have brought people together, and how I wish I could do that again, but I keep hiding due to the difficult people anyone necessarily has to deal with when attracting an audience. I've been going back and forth for months about whether to make another attempt at forming some kind of close-knit thoughts-and-feelings-sharing community based around personality psychology or something, but never get around to it due to past experiences... SIGH.

That video points out how two recent successful works of media did well maybe because they dealt with themes of loneliness and isolation. I often want to write stories about those but worry people would be put off. Maybe not? Something I'll likely be thinking about when trying to iron out some story details for Dreamons and whatever I do with the side side project I've yet to even decide on a name for.

It also got me thinking about things like Undertale, Pizza Tower, Digital Circus, Homestuck, Undertale etc in a different light to how I was thinking when I started this post. As something more positive that brings people together through shared references even if they didn't directly play through them together...

Anyway, I should stop rambling and actually post this!!