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Dreamons Progress, Anxiety Rant, Digimon Again

6 months ago4,015 words

Ugh, I started writing this post with satisfaction and hope a few days ago, as I've finally got to a point with Dreamons that I've been striving towards for ages, but stuff has happened since then and now I feel compelled to turn it into yet another frustrated rant about anxiety. Maybe folic acid will help with that though?? Also (and completely unrelatedly), Digimon again!!1

The positive feelings came from finally achieving a game dev goal I've been working towards for the past few weeks or months: I've made a half-an-hour-long gameplay video of Dreamons, like the Belief one from years ago.




Instead of including it here and then 'spoiling' it with some unrelated rant, I'll likely post it on ∞ my Patreon ∞ on the weekend.

(I really need to better separate my personal mental illness diary from my games dev reports...)

I know it's not exactly the ideal way to present a game, though I thought it'd be more interesting and informative than just text rambling and screenshots. There are more things I need to do before I can get a playable demo ready.



Now for the rant.

I was meant to be going to the third session of some Mindfulness group thing yesterday, but didn't go... just like with the Counselling Skills class I tried a while back. This means I've missed two of the four sessions.

There are three main reasons why: the nature of the thing, the hopelessness I feel about connection, and what I'll call 'external obstacles'.

By 'nature of the thing', I mean that both this and the Counselling skills course were 95% sitting quietly and listening to someone lecture. Chances to interact with the others were brief and awkward. Something where we were actively doing something - and could talk while doing it - would be better. Sitting still in an unfamiliar environment just makes me feel anxious and 'trapped'.

The group is small, and most are elderly, which isn't what I'm hoping to find in terms of connections. Two seemed closer to my age, but one of the things holding me back this time was the thought that maybe they would want to get to know me, which I felt fearful about since I seem to have a black-or-white view of connections. Most of the time, they just feel a burden I'm incapable of shouldering, but in a few rare cases, where I feel the stars align just right, I become anxiously attached and like them probably more than they like me.

The two younger people there didn't fall into this rare latter category for me, from what little I've seen of them. Maybe we'd get along well, if I wasn't so resistant to the idea! But my mind compels me to avoid, in a way I imagine isn't massively different to how OCD compulsions work, maybe. There are many things where I've wanted to do them, and tried to do them, but literally couldn't; my mind put up barriers preventing my action. In this case, I can't say that I even want to interact with the people I've seen - it's more like I acknowledge there may potentially be some positives from being open to the idea - so the barriers seem to be even stronger.

I also mentioned 'external obstacles'. The biggest was some anxiety/health stuff I've been dealing with for the past few days related to my fainting/blood/heart issues of the past few weeks. I wrote more about that in an a previous draft of this post that I'll include below. Another was that my step-dad's relatives came over around the time I would have had to start getting ready to leave, meaning I wouldn't be able to avoid them like I usually do. In other circumstances, maybe I would have been able to push through that facet of madness, but I felt so beaten down by other stuff this time that the obstacle felt insurmountable.

...I usually cringe while writing about these issues, since I know how pathetic and alien they must seem to people who are lucky to not be burdened with them. I wish I could just turn them off, or 'man up' and just push through or whatever, but sadly it doesn't work that way. If it did, if I were capable of that, I wouldn't be stuck where I am in life.

Not going to the class wasn't some casual decision, by the way. I spent all day thinking about it, dwelling on all the potential outcomes, going back and forth between "I'll hate myself if I don't" and "but I can't this time". I lost the entire day to being trapped in a state of constant anticipatory anxiety. I finally sent an email saying I won't be able to attend about ten minutes before I'd intended to start getting ready to leave, and I still feel tense about it all now.

I know that I need to change my life, get out there, that being such a shut-in isn't good for me. But trying to change things causes me so much stress and lost time. It's why I wish I had someone to tackle things together with, ideally a loving partner, though maybe I'm only deluding myself by thinking that'd be any easier.

I spent a chunk of the day trying to talk with ChatGPT about all my many issues and what I could do about them (I hoped I'd be able to access the apparently free (and eerily advanced) 4o version that came out the other day), since it seemed like a free and instant alternative to a therapist that might know more than the average one anyway, but it all just felt like going around in frustrating circles. The same old suggestions and trite advice:

Try meetup groups! I actually checked meetup.com; literally the only thing in reasonable distance was a hiking group I'm not nearly fit enough for.

Get therapy! I looked through a directory of local therapists, again, and maybe in the near future I'll finally try paying to see if it's anything other than a waste of money.

Recognise your strengths! I already know what I'm good at and what I like, but also what I'm not good at and don't like, and the former don't lead me out of this pit.

I'm so frustrated by all this that I've been racking my brain for ideas that might resonate better with my eccentricities. For the past few years, I've been using some tool I made for myself to track my moods throughout the day, and a while back I also intended to use that to track things like daily steps or to-do lists for games and things I was working on.

Tracking the moods has become a regular habit, it 'clicked' with my mind, but the same can't be said about tracking daily steps or to-do lists, at least as they're currently structured in the tool.

I have some thoughts about how to revise that in a way I hope might work better for me (for example, making a list of big life milestones I want to reach that'd be visible to me every time I look at that tool rather than hidden in some document somewhere), so I'll try that. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but I need to try something that I feel I can actually do.

...I just remembered that I also have some other tool I made to specifically tackle my avoidant tendencies. If I'd used that yesterday, maybe I would have gone to the class! Ugh. I literally forgot it existed, though. Maybe I need to put a reminder about that somewhere where I'll actually see it, or just use it more regularly to make it a habit.



I started writing this post a few days ago - Monday morning or Sunday night, I think - and mostly talked about medical stuff, but kept delaying posting to update it. Might as well include that rather than just scrapping it:

I had my blood drawn last week. Was that last week? I can barely remember it. The whole thing was so quick and routine that the nurses didn't even bother to close the door of the room I went in, and I was done and out before I knew what was going on. The most interesting part of it was seeing the quaint... medical building (I hesitate to use the term 'hospital' as it was so small) nestled amid trees and suburban houses. I'm used to bigger hospitals for all the brain treatment stuff. I still went in the wrong entrance, though!

I was told to wait for the doctor to contact me next, or if they haven't in a few days, to contact them.

Hopefully they'll find some nutrient deficiency or something, since I woke up in the middle of last night feeling sick, not unlike how I felt before I last fainted...

...

Actually, wait, a bit of a rant that I'm writing on Monday around 4:30pm: I just got a call from... some medical service - I don't know which of the several similarly-named places I've been to that it was - telling me that my blood had been checked and my prescription was ready to be picked up at the local chemist. I said "uhh.. what? What do I have to do now, then?", and the woman's tone shifted as if she realised she was talking to some simpleton. She said I had to go and collect the medicine and then I'd have to take it. I was sort of stunned and we just ended the call there.

What I SHOULD have asked, if it hadn't taken me by surprise while I was in the middle of something, was why I'd been prescribed medicine without even confirming what the issue was. I've been recording my blood pressure for the past two weeks with a monitor I was told to buy for that purpose; is this data not relevant? (The data produce an average of 121/75, which isn't concerningly high or low, at least.) I mean, I haven't had a chance to give it to the doctor since I haven't seen him again. Has he just looked at the blood results and diagnosed something without a follow-up to discuss them? Is this just the way it normally works, which I'm just not used to since I rarely see the doctor?

(I've had plenty of medical stuff done over the years for the brain cancer, but I suppose most of that was done for me by the hospitals, and the procedures seem different to when seeing a GP.)

I'll need to contact the surgery tomorrow and ask... during the very narrow 8am window.

People who work in these worlds, I've found, are so familiar with the ins and outs that they don't take into account that people who might not know. It's bothered me all throughout the brain treatments and mental health help seeking. And I suppose this little seaside town is so full of old people for whom new medical prescriptions are a weekly - or even daily - thing that they tend to be surprised by anyone who isn't one of them.

Bleh. Rant. Now I'm just cringing about not asking more in the call, and annoyed about having to ask tomorrow. I'll probably delay posting this until after that, then...

...

I've delayed posting this until the next day so I can write more about this. It's Tuesday now, and I just got back from the doctor's... sort of.

I called in the morning to ask if I even needed to make an appointment... but couldn't get through. The call just cut off. Tried every few minutes for two or three hours, no luck. I lost all morning due to anxiety about it all. Anxiety affects me most when I'm anticipating something, so I hate making calls (but don't mind getting them unexpectedly).

Since the surgery is just a five minute walk away, I just eventually walked there and asked at the reception. Apparently their phones had issues in the morning. Great. At least it wasn't on my end, I suppose.

And apparently the doctor had just made his diagnosis and prescription 'off-screen' without a follow-up meeting, which bothers me. And the people who'd called me about that were from my local surgery, not the separate blood-drawing place. But the location shown on my phone for the unknown number showed the other place because they share an area code? Or something.

Ugh. I don't know how much of my frustration about all this is because I'm such a shut-in, and how much others get bothered by it all too. One of my uni friends - who's not from the UK - ranted at me recently about how much she hates the UK medical system compared to her country's, due to the need to go through GPs (general practitioners). If you don't regularly go through all this stuff, how are you supposed to just know how it all works??

Annoyingly, though, while picking up the prescription, I was in a queue with several people - mostly elderly - who all seemed to be intimately familiar with the whole process. I was stuck behind an old man who was telling the woman behind the desk about the various medications he was currently taking, how he already had a stash of one but needed another or else he couldn't function...

I just felt more anxious than I had in ages; on the verge of a panic attack, even. If not for doing breathing exercises, I probably would have fainted; I felt on the brink of it. Sweating, shaking, lightheaded...

I blame lack of sleep in this case - I struggled with insomnia last night - as well as anxiety I generally feel when I'm somewhere unfamiliar and I don't know the procedure I'm supposed to follow but feel like I'm surrounded by other people who do. I suppose I also felt trapped, or something, on some primal, subconscious level, since I had to just stand still and couldn't pace around.

How could I cope in the real world??

The belief - or perhaps realisation - that I can't is why I'm still doing this games dev stuff from my cocoon...

Bleh. Anyway. Apparently I was prescribed folic acid supplements, since that's the only deficiency my blood tests showed. Not what I would have expected; I thought they'd find more issues. I googled folic acid a bit, especially how it might correspond to anxiety, and some people said it immensely helped their anxiety while others said it made theirs worse.

I'll just have to take it for a few days and see how - or if - it affects me.

It seems to me like the majority of people are on a variety of 'meds', and not being on any at all is one of many reasons I feel like an alien. I've written before about my reluctance to try medication specifically for mental health conditions, but I wonder how much of the symptoms could be alleviated by targetted vitamin supplements. There are probably all kinds of issues that many of us deal with daily that are due to imbalances in these bodily statistics.

I really wish we could just check our levels on some Status screen!!

...

I've delayed posting this for another day because I was so worn out by the anxiety that I felt unable to do some final proofreading/editing.

I saw ∞ this Reddit thread ∞ earlier where doctors were talking about the weirdest/worst things their patients have done. Many of their behaviours or mental blind spots were worse than my own, at least, but it all makes me wonder what portion of people are completely well-adjusted, and how many are ignorant about basic things.

I don't remember ever coming across anyone as clueless about mundane procedures necessary for living in the real world as I am, but I'm a shut-in who rarely interacts with anyone. I do worry and feel embarrassed about my ignorance, but also don't really know how to improve other than drastically changing my entire life around...

Though I suppose I do need to do that anyway. Ehhh.



Speaking of adult responsibilities and real-world competence...

Was it also only a week or so ago that I got my new Digimon virtual pet things?? Feels like longer. They've evolved now, look:




I know all the hundreds of comments last time were screaming "YOU'LL NEVER EVOLVE THEM TO MEGA STAGE, YOU GONE-OFF CAN OF CHEAP DOG FOOD!", verbatim, but GUESS WHAT, you doubters! They're ALL Mega stage now!! They are Valdurmon, BlitzGreymon, and SkullMammothmon!! I'd even heard of one of those before, gasp!! Are you falling off your chairs with wowness?? I can't stay on mine because I just look down at these and feel so EGADS'D that I faint once again! They are not good for my already poor health!!!

Also I'm kind of doubting my decision to get them in the first place, since I keep forgetting about them and the thought of pressing their buttons for a few seconds feels like an annoying distraction more than anything.

Which is probably how I'd feel if I were ever to get the hypothetical partner I feel so lost without!!!

Speaking of getting a partner, those compelled me to return to yet another childhood game:




It's Digimon World 2, which I played a lot back then but which I've never finished. Completely unlike Digimon World 1 (with which I assume everyone is intimately familiar and plays for at least nine hours a day), it's a Roguelike (kind of? Wikipedia apparently calls it a 'dungeon crawler' and doesn't include it on the List of Roguelikes) where you venture into procedurally-generated dungeons and battle the digimon therein.

It was probably the biggest inspiration for Beast Signer (other than Pokemon, I suppose), in terms of aesthetics and things like having to breed/combine your monsters to increase their level cap (did Beast Signer include that? I vaguely remember that it did, but haven't played it in years, so maybe it was some other game I made).

I never completed the game because it's an absolute slog. The battles are slow, clunky, and straightforward. Most Digimon have a single skill, and can only learn more by combining, which resets them back several levels. You have to slooowly select skills for all three of your Digimon at once, then yours and the opponents skills all execute; I hate turn-based systems like this. And, even worse, there are seconds-long gaps between animations firing that serve no purpose other than to delay things.

And to make it even WORSE, the battle music is less than 30 seconds long and made up of two sections that mostly repeat the same motifs several times without variation:




And I've been worrying that Dreamons' two-and-a-half-minute-long battle theme might be too annoyingly short and repetitive!

There's also no equivalent of a Pokedex, and it's completely unclear what anything will evolve into or get merged into. Will my Greymon and Airdramon combine into an Agumon or a Biyomon? Who knows!! Why does Biyomon evolve into Airdramon anyway? Who knows!! I like Airdamon a lot. Well too bad, because after it's been merged twice, Biyomon evolves into something else instead!!

I found ∞ this chart ∞ that gave me answers to things I'd wondered about for years. Would it have been so hard to just include something like that in the game??

The only way I've found it bearable to attempt to play through is by using the emulator's speedup function to just zoom through repetitive, mindless battles. But even then I'm not sure whether I'll be able to stick with it.

I actually looked for mods - which is something I never do - hoping some might have modernised it at least a bit, but none that I found changed the bits I wanted changed (battle sluggishness, mostly). I did see at least some people pouring time and effort into making mods for it, or talking about how much they loved it during their childhood and how nostalgic it was to return to it.

Which I suppose is how people feel about MARDEK. We don't love old games because they're good, necessarily, but because they remind us of simpler times. I wish I could just go back and play this one like I used to, before I was CRUSHED BY TRAUMA!!! and everything.

I'm also still playing through FFIX, though I may talk about that separately, if at all. Jumping between Digimon World and FFIX was quite the stark contrast; the latter feels like high art by comparison.



Also, I mentioned getting a new monitor last week. I'm now used to it, and the colours look so much more vibrant than my old one! If I look at it at the exact right angle, anyway. The new resolution feels natural to me now, too. Better than what I had before.



I suppose for now I'll try improving the mood-tracking tool I made for myself, to include things that I hope might help to address the many issues holding me back.

Gamification can help with motivation and habit establishing, so maybe I'll restructure things with that in mind. Like giving myself daily or weekly 'quests' like 'go out for a walk', for which I get 'points' or whatever. It's worth a try.

I'll post on Patreon (and maybe also here) about the Dreamons video on the weekend, hopefully. I'm kind of bracing myself for no feedback since that's largely dried up these days, but at the very least it'll be some personal milestone and a stepping stone towards other things like promoting the game on Reddit.

Speaking of Reddit, a day or two ago I saw a post in one of the game dev subs by someone my age whose skillset, employment history (or lack thereof), and current life situation sounded similar to mine... who was able to keep making indie games alone thanks to the support of his wife. As is so often the case when I see other creators! I almost commented to say "HOW YOU FIND WIFE" or whatever, but... didn't. I imagine the answer would essentially be "luck" anyway.

But there's no point dwelling on that. Venting helps relieve a lot of stress, so writing out this relentless torrent of logorrhoea (even if it took days) has been valuable, but now I should start playing around with my tool. Then I'll update the mood-tracker thing with to-do lists. Do you get the funny joke there. Ha. Ha. Ha.

(Actually that's another thing anxiety kills any desire to do. Ha. Ha. Ugh. I'm so dosh garn professional.)



ALSO, since this post clearly isn't long enough, I just watched the second episode of this thing after putting it off for days:



That's made by people who are probably more like me than anyone I'd meet by going to local group events, who found one another through fortune. I wish I'd been so lucky. Maybe one day? Hmm.