![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4:53pm - Well I'm back. The last couple of days have been weird with my sleeping or awake at the strangest hours and for the longest times. Emotionally I've been up and down and all over, but today seems like a good one, at least since I managed to get out of bed, a little before 10am this morning.
My roomie is having a weird sleep day too, giving his usual livestream a pass to sleep more.
Ah well.
I managed to get one of two important tasks done today, and sent some photos of my furniture to my Dad for analysis. The other task I'd like to do, I can't find inspiration for. I feel bad for making Inktail wait so long for the story. Alas.
So I'm trying to figure out what to do with myself now. I'd like to work on my Roguelike Project some more, so I probably will, but I'm also concerned about the future in general. I don't know if I had realized how invested I was in the idea of applying to Oncelost games, but when I lost my confidence over the last week I realized I wouldn't be able to do that job, or any job in the professional games industry, and that was a hard blow.
Regardless of my performance in the actual 7DRL jam, I think I did pretty well despite not finishing, the experience showed me that I couldn't reliably work on something I love doing for the required duration of standardized work. That is to say, eight or nine hours a day, five to seven days a week. Longer in video game crunch time!
So it's unreasonable for me to go for standard jobs. I could barely handle working three nights a week at the Walmart, and maybe I could do a desk job part-time, but I don't know what I'll be able to find like that...
I'm planning to move back to Sarnia this fall, or next year if that doesn't work out. Back to my family home, with my Dad. London's been pretty good but part of the reason I moved here was to find work in video games, or something else. It hasn't worked out, and while I don't think the prospects are any better in Sarnia, the cost of living will drop a lot, and I'll have room for my friends. Rob's coming too, and eventually I'm hoping to bring Alex up from the States. My Dad's fine with them living with us. It'll give him some company, and we'll fix up the house and keep him from wasting as much food.
It's going to be a lot of work for me, and for my family and friends too. But we can afford to work for ourselves.
I don't know if it's a step forward or a step back, but it's the next step and I'm taking it.
I need to find some way to accept working for myself. Maybe with help, maybe alone. And I need to find something I can do that I enjoy and that can make money. I don't think this Roguelike project is going to make me any money, even though it's good practice and good fun. It's also a good re-starting for my Dungeon Creator project, since a lot of what I'm doing can be repurposed for that. It was going to use a lot of the same Roguelike tech anyways. But I don't know if I'll want to work on that more or not.
There's no doubt that a game like that is a dream of mine to make, but I don't know if that specific version of it is the one I want to make, or if I'll even have the motivation to work on it again after the first time I lost interest.
The easiest game project to make that I could sell wouldn't neccesarily be the most fun. But, I wouldn't even be mentioning it if I wasn't considering making it. I could make a Platformer or a Metroidvania pretty easily in Godot or even Unity if I went back to that. Those engines are practically made for producing that kind of game. The problem of course is innovation. Why would anybody play my Platformer or Metroidvania when they could play the latest AAA or indie gem? I don't have the money or artistic skill to beat anybody on style alone.
I'm mostly into simulation games myself, and there are some good ones that are solo developed and make money. Obviously that dungeon creator game falls in this category, but it would take a long time to make money if it ever did. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn't worry so much about making money as fast as possible.
What else could I make? Well, I suppose the other obvious route is the colony sim. Games like Dwarf Fortress have come out all over the place, and they don't have to be nearly as advanced as Dwarf Fortress is in order to be popular. A couple I have now are Rimworld and Amazing Cultivation Simulator. If I made a colony sim it would probably be more like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley though. I'm not sure if that's what I really want to do though.
At any rate I seem to just be running in circles like usual. I've talked about all these ideas before.
6:42pm - I was planning on doing some work on my Roguelike Project after all that but time flies, it's already almost 7pm and I have a Pathfinder game tonight.
7:55pm - The guys took a while to get ready, so I had time to program some more. I switched up the ActorFactory so I just pass all those references to the factory, and not each actor individually. Then I fixed up the deaths. The monsters die fine. The player dies a little weird. Doesn't crash the game, but bugs it out bad.
10:28pm - Well I was planning to work some more after the pathfinder game but now I'm feeling terribly tired and not very creative, so I'mma just bow out for the night.
My roomie is having a weird sleep day too, giving his usual livestream a pass to sleep more.
Ah well.
I managed to get one of two important tasks done today, and sent some photos of my furniture to my Dad for analysis. The other task I'd like to do, I can't find inspiration for. I feel bad for making Inktail wait so long for the story. Alas.
So I'm trying to figure out what to do with myself now. I'd like to work on my Roguelike Project some more, so I probably will, but I'm also concerned about the future in general. I don't know if I had realized how invested I was in the idea of applying to Oncelost games, but when I lost my confidence over the last week I realized I wouldn't be able to do that job, or any job in the professional games industry, and that was a hard blow.
Regardless of my performance in the actual 7DRL jam, I think I did pretty well despite not finishing, the experience showed me that I couldn't reliably work on something I love doing for the required duration of standardized work. That is to say, eight or nine hours a day, five to seven days a week. Longer in video game crunch time!
So it's unreasonable for me to go for standard jobs. I could barely handle working three nights a week at the Walmart, and maybe I could do a desk job part-time, but I don't know what I'll be able to find like that...
I'm planning to move back to Sarnia this fall, or next year if that doesn't work out. Back to my family home, with my Dad. London's been pretty good but part of the reason I moved here was to find work in video games, or something else. It hasn't worked out, and while I don't think the prospects are any better in Sarnia, the cost of living will drop a lot, and I'll have room for my friends. Rob's coming too, and eventually I'm hoping to bring Alex up from the States. My Dad's fine with them living with us. It'll give him some company, and we'll fix up the house and keep him from wasting as much food.
It's going to be a lot of work for me, and for my family and friends too. But we can afford to work for ourselves.
I don't know if it's a step forward or a step back, but it's the next step and I'm taking it.
I need to find some way to accept working for myself. Maybe with help, maybe alone. And I need to find something I can do that I enjoy and that can make money. I don't think this Roguelike project is going to make me any money, even though it's good practice and good fun. It's also a good re-starting for my Dungeon Creator project, since a lot of what I'm doing can be repurposed for that. It was going to use a lot of the same Roguelike tech anyways. But I don't know if I'll want to work on that more or not.
There's no doubt that a game like that is a dream of mine to make, but I don't know if that specific version of it is the one I want to make, or if I'll even have the motivation to work on it again after the first time I lost interest.
The easiest game project to make that I could sell wouldn't neccesarily be the most fun. But, I wouldn't even be mentioning it if I wasn't considering making it. I could make a Platformer or a Metroidvania pretty easily in Godot or even Unity if I went back to that. Those engines are practically made for producing that kind of game. The problem of course is innovation. Why would anybody play my Platformer or Metroidvania when they could play the latest AAA or indie gem? I don't have the money or artistic skill to beat anybody on style alone.
I'm mostly into simulation games myself, and there are some good ones that are solo developed and make money. Obviously that dungeon creator game falls in this category, but it would take a long time to make money if it ever did. On the other hand, maybe I shouldn't worry so much about making money as fast as possible.
What else could I make? Well, I suppose the other obvious route is the colony sim. Games like Dwarf Fortress have come out all over the place, and they don't have to be nearly as advanced as Dwarf Fortress is in order to be popular. A couple I have now are Rimworld and Amazing Cultivation Simulator. If I made a colony sim it would probably be more like Harvest Moon or Stardew Valley though. I'm not sure if that's what I really want to do though.
At any rate I seem to just be running in circles like usual. I've talked about all these ideas before.
6:42pm - I was planning on doing some work on my Roguelike Project after all that but time flies, it's already almost 7pm and I have a Pathfinder game tonight.
7:55pm - The guys took a while to get ready, so I had time to program some more. I switched up the ActorFactory so I just pass all those references to the factory, and not each actor individually. Then I fixed up the deaths. The monsters die fine. The player dies a little weird. Doesn't crash the game, but bugs it out bad.
10:28pm - Well I was planning to work some more after the pathfinder game but now I'm feeling terribly tired and not very creative, so I'mma just bow out for the night.
