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Do the things you want to do. Life is long, and it's great despite it all.
Do the things you want to do. Life is long, and it's great despite it all.
Greetings, long time no see. This is going to be a long one, even compared to the past two entries I have already written before, so if you're going to be reading this through fully I advise you get yourself a drink, maybe a snack, set the environment and get comfortable. If you don't, it is what it is.
Well, it's long past those game jams I mentioned. In truth, I only tried to participate in one, but it was only because I missed the start of the other two and don't want to be in a place where I would have to rush. Yeah...I only tried, didn't even get something remotely playable unfortunately, but it taught me something interesting not relating to game development but moreso to myself so I'd like to talk about it in this space of mine, especially since it'll be a very long time before the very few people I wouldn't want to see my whispers end up seeing it one day so I might as well.
is that a Limbus reference??? (Canto 10 was peak btw, and I wish Buffet didn't get nerfed, I beat it before the nerf first attempt T_T)
So in that time I tried to partake in my first game jam, I made a very small thing in Godot. It was a Roulette wheel type of thing, because the theme was Spin to Win, and it was my very first time truly using Godot, as my experiences with it before were extremely brief. It took me a good about half of the jam, about 4-5 days of the 7, just to program the wheel.
It sounds really bad I know, but let me defend myself here!! I'm not necessarily familiar with Godot's coding structure at all. This wouldn't be necessarily bad if it was my first experience with a game engine, I think Godot is a greta engine and basically the best choice for anyone starting out in game dev...but I don't know about it if you already have a good bit of experience with other engines...
Godot's syntax and coding structure confused me for days, I just couldn't wrap my head around it and it was immensely stressful. I still made sure to take some breaks every now and then and talked with friends while I worked sometimes to ease myself the mental burden of the reality in front of me but...it was just such an enigma to me. However, I eventually did it, I got the roulette to spin and gradually stop and then be able to read the section it stopped on...and it was euphoric, and that's what made me finally realize my issue with creating things, I haven't been letting myself fail to succeed.
It's what was blocking me this whole time. I was afraid to learn because I was massively afraid of failure. For those reading who know me but might not know...my self-confidence is absolutely shattered. Honestly, was mostly a byproduct of living with family members that basically had nothing but disdain for what I decided to enjoy but I started to realize it only now. It's the reason I haven't been just sitting down and making anything, the reason I wouldn't learn, the reason I just wouldn't try, hell, it's the reason I barely play PvP games nowadays & why I'm a pure lurker online and don't interact basically at all in places like Discord servers anymore, I'm just so utterly afraid of my own losses. I know it's a common lesson taught basically all the time that just about nobody is usually really good at something going in, and that basically almost everyone has gone through the Tunnel of Failure, but I can't pull myself to drive down that road, and that game jam made me realize that.
Outside of my younger days when I was just learning game dev off basically no knowledge and was just having fun getting something going, I only had two more recent instances of having immense fun creating something. One was the jam as I've mentioned before, and the other was this very website. I know I shill the fact I made a personal website a lot now ever since I got this site to a good state(you can partially blame scam accounts!!) but it was so fun. So stressful, but such a dopamine high that I've been actively avoiding. Before this site, I only made one other site since I took Web Design as my minor during my Associate run for Game Design in college, but that site was made with Adobe Dreamweaver which I obviously don't have access to now since I'm no longer a student, so making this website basically entirely from scratch was an entirely new experience for me. I had a lot of frustrations, but every time I got something to work, it felt so great, and everything started getting more comfortable and significantly faster. I started routinely working on this site every day till I reached a satisfactory point, and just deciding to work on it if I was bored, it was a brief, amazing period of my post-college life, and will probably be a period I remember for the rest of my life even.
Easier said than done, but it's time I pick myself up and fight Procrastination for real. I'll start progressively doing everything that comes to mind that I want to do, immediately. I can't keep caring about the frankly delusional standards I set for myself probably from social media, I simply won't make anything if I keep letting this fear get to me. It's basically been pinpointed as the worst enemy, as I continue to deeply enjoy creative processes even if they give me some stress or it takes a lot of time, I want to keep doing it!
...It's a sense of happiness, isn't it? After a conversation I've had with a friend regarding a creeping lack of motivation I had, my motivation to do what I want to do shot up, and every since then things have looked so much more beautiful to me. Genuinely, I've been finding more joy out of the games I already play, I've been setting myself on more routines, I've been starting to manage my time better, I've been just enjoying the smaller things. I've just been starting to enjoy the journey, for the only me that'll ever exist is me, and I just want to work towards making sure the world never forgets that. I'm going to trip and fall, the walk will get bumpy, I'll get tired, I might get injured even, but I'll crawl if I have to, because I want all of this life.
Life is still life though, and contrary to the beliefs of a few family members of mine, I do indeed understand shit isn't free. I still gotta continue seeking employment now that college is said and done and I actively have. Haven't been lucky lately, is what it is the market is terrible, but I'll still keep trying here too. I just can't abandon my dreams for that, there's things I want to do too, so I'll obviously be seeking a job that can fund that, and the money needed for that isn't high...that's a talk for another time though.
Try. Even if you fail, even if seems out of your reach, even if you can only try for a brief period of time. Without walking the path you'll never reach the destination. The process of learning something is to fail to succeed. It's not a linear curve and even once you get better you might still make things that are unsatisfactory, and that's okay. Most of all, don't forget to enjoy it. It doesn't matter how you make yourself enjoy it, but if you don't enjoy what you're investing your time into it's not worth the effort, yeah?
Little extra, it's kinda optional but extremely helpful for your mental to prevent yourself from getting demotivated, but start a journal or blog of your attempts doing the things you wanted to do! It's mainly helpful with creative work, but documenting anything you do will make you feel better about it over time as you look at how far you go.
I really wanna emphasize on the time thing though for a bit, go on a little tangent of my own. So I'm not a competitive person at all, as a matter of fact I'm a cooperative person, I'd rather either have everyone succeed with me or have everyone else succeed more than me. If my own success is fine with me, that's all that matters to me, I frankly care more for others getting the life they deserve than my own. That being said, that's why I tend to dislike it when I see friends of mine just...not try. Might say they want to do something and then never do it or barely touch it or never work towards it. Now, the size of people I'm specifically referring to is really small, it's like 1 or 2 people, but it's just something I want to mention nonetheless. Even if you can only play that game, or draw that art, or work on that programming for only about five minutes, it's still worth it for the progress alone as long as you keep going at it. It's not going anywhere, and as long as you actively engage with it at all routinely, whether it's once a day or once a week, you'll build up something special for you. Maybe you'll have a new game you love to play, or now you have art you created you can appreciate, or now you got that program up and running...maybe with a few bugs lol, but you did it. It'll feel great, no matter how long it takes you, the world can wait. Just don't do it like once a month or something, that's way too infrequent, it's barely a routine at that point. Once a day or once a week!
For me, I'm going to start getting over this fear of failing. I've been beginning to just go straight to making things I want to make, and starting to routinely practice other skills that are part of developing games(mainly general art & pixel art + music). It's a lot of different skills I gotta pick up, so I can't train every one simultaneously in a day, simply not enough time for that, but I'll do my best to get all of them in every week! I'll also side quest and do some rhythm game fan charting as well, one of my dream jobs is to be a charter for a major RG, so I'll have to work on that too when I can, but it's not as "important" as being able to truly develop an independent game of my own. I have ideas there, and I have to chase them.
I've been pretty hopeful for my tomorrows now, and I hope other people can come to feel the same eventually. One thing that isn't changing about me for sure is that I'm still definitely going to be a denizen of the night! I've just been plain having trouble sleeping during most midnights now, doesn't seem to be any medical condition I'm pretty sure my body is just poised to be unable to sleep at night unless I'm ridiculously exhausted. To me, not a bad thing, I love the midnight, I work best when the city is quiet, just how I am. Wish there were more nightshift jobs out there, I wanna be working on a schedule like a FNaF game protagionist. Either way, not doing anything about that, I've failed every time I've tried anyways.
I'll be waiting patiently to see what you end up doing though! That's not like supportive slop phrasing or anything it's fun to see new interesting stuff popping up, especially in the current age, I don't want AI generated media!! Go make stuff if you wanna make stuff, we need to show the world that in the aspect of creation, the Humanity of the art cannot die!
Last paragraph of this entry to talk about something more fun, time to turn off the philosophy now and go back to the usual Marlon channel. Tomorrow Arknights will have its 7.5th Anni and Kal'tsit Alter will come out. Plz guys, to everyone reading this at all, anyone who got this far down, pray she comes home in my pulls. Kal'tsit is one of my favorite characters in the verse, and one of the very few characters I have nearly maxed. I NEED HERRRRRRR!!!
*ahem* Anyways...
So, thank you. Once again, as many times as I'll write these whispers, thanks for listening to this lone whisper in the void.