This month was a completely different kind of weird month than the last weird month – but weird nonetheless.
I ended up taking around two weeks of vacation, between a planned family visit, a memorial service, and associated travel times. When I got back the entire city was blanketed in toxic smoke particles, so I had to lock myself indoors – even more so than I do habitually, and with less ventilation. And, between these trips and certain extremely stressful interpersonal conflicts, I’ve been thinking about things – about where I’m going with my life, how I want to get there, and what that will look like.
First, I should probably address the lack of posts on the blog. I could have probably kept things going, but I’ve been feeling like it’s harder and harder to come up with topics that I feel are worth writing about, to the extent that I don’t feel some of my posts are to the level of insight or quality I want them to be. If all else were equal I’d just shake it off as a bad streak, but I think it’s also just been hard to focus with all of this strife and uncertainty in my life, so I’ve put things on hiatus for a bit. I wanted to make some sort of official announcement about that, but I kept putting it off until now, when I needed to write a devblog post anyway. I intend to resume posting on the previous schedule starting in November.
Regarding my plans for the future: The game is still being made, but I also feel like I need to put a bit more into existing as a professional in the here and now rather than just in a nebulous future. Towards this end, I’ve decided to start seeking freelance work – and, tangentially, if you would like to hire me to do any of the sorts of work you have seen/read/heard here at Problem Machine, please feel free to email me with inquiries at problem.machine@gmail.com. However, as soon as I began looking for contract work, I realized that I feel a crushing lack of confidence in what I have to show as portfolio work right now. I don’t feel like what I have done shows in any way what I am truly capable of doing – and, since I happen to have come into a bit of money recently, enough to relieve my most immediate financial pressures, for a while I will be shifting my focus from just surviving while I make my game to making my game, learning and practicing, and building my portfolio. I have a list of what I want to create over the next few months, a list I don’t really care to get into the specifics of at the moment, but which involves a number of art, programming, music, and game development tasks. Once this list is complete, I expect to have a body of work that I can be really proud of, something which, even if it isn’t outstanding in every respect, can at least be regarded as roundly workmanlike and occasionally exceptional.
Now I’m 500 words in and I haven’t really talked about the game much at all. Despite everything, I have gotten some work in on the project – mostly, at this point, developing the attack animations for the sub-types of mask enemy.
And when I say mostly, I mean entirely, since I really haven’t had more than a week or two free to actually work this month. As I’m working on building my portfolio I’ll probably have a bit less time to work on the game, but will continue to plug doggedly away at it, if for no other reason than my skull starts feeling too small for my brain if I stop for any significant length of time. It should be fairly easy to finish developing these enemies animation-wise, and then I can revisit the behavior code to fix the remaining issues with their in-game behavior, which shouldn’t be too hard. Once these guys are done, there’s only a couple more enemies to develop for the opening sections of the game, one of which is pretty simple, and I can probably refocus my attention on building up the aesthetic of the early stages. In the meanwhile, future devblog updates will probably contain samples of the work I do in building up my portfolio, which hopefully will be of interest to those of you who have been interested in the game in the first place.