The outward directed motion has continued. I’ve had a week of pretty intense involvement with some very specific parts of the world. It really does seem like things will just keep happening for the rest of time, huh?
I’ve just returned from a much needed forest hike. This time, I even managed to embark before sunset, so as to see the hills and trees and such. It all felt very poetic. Do Firtrees branch? No, they cascade towards the sky.
Time Remover has not been played by a lot of people. There is an impulse to talk about the cost of retreating from social media, or about how I feel that the game dev scene has changed, but I’ll go with assuming that the experience was not really compelling. I think I should have tested the dynamic of the clearer tutorialisation. But I’ll look into that at some later time. It’s okay to just give this game some space before engaging with it again. The general struggle with playing extends extremely especially towards my own work shortly after release.
So, what’s next? I’ve semi-committed internally to trying to release one game per month again. I don’t feel like pushing myself to achieve this. Instead, I hope to simplify whatever idea I have until it becomes very easy to execute. I don’t intend to spend a lot of energy on simplifying. If nothing works out by the end of the month: whatever.
After finishing this post, I will work a little bit more on the current idea. This time, I don’t want to talk about the work at all. Looking at one thing too intensely seems to encourage the inward-turning that I am currently trying to avoid.
I have been thinking a lot about what I’ve been putting into these blogposts and how much of myself I reveal here. Looking back, I feel like I’ve been managing to only talk about stuff that felt right to talk about at the moment. That’s pretty nice :)
Thank you for checking in, by the way. There’s still no RSS for this blog, sorry. I should also write a standalone post about how this website is built & maintained, because this is the most common question I get about this. But yeah. Some day.
The other work, that has been ramping up steadily over the last weeks and that I will not describe more specifically, has still been going well. I’m back to making decisions and I’m feeling competent. It’s a new process, but yeah. Later.
The chats with colleagues have progressed in very specific directions, which is nice because I’ve had to pay the first of four large social security payments. It’s all accounted for, but there is a difference between knowing a specific amount of money will go away and actually seeing it dissappear. Nothing about the math has changed, but I now feel uneasy about my finances. Having multiple projects in multiple states feels like a good response to that fear. Diversify.
Short, intense and concise bursts of work seem to be the current state of affairs. It allows me a high degree of flexibility in how I want to spend my days, which I’ve really needed for private reasons. It’s an intense luxury, being able to stop working spontaneously. This is the state I want to maintain by monetising the thing that I had once pledged undying artistic integrity to.
Eh. That’s just me being dramatic out of habit. I’m genuinely very happy with the trades I’ve made so far. This week I’ve been playing mariokart, listening to the iron horse album and thinking about my old roommate. I’ll turn thirty this year. Weird.