This is a continuous miniblog with small, recent-first texts regarding nothing and everything.
It’s just a way I have of writing without worrying about having a full blog post with references and, like, content.
As nothing I do is original, this is inspired by Stuffed Wombat’s blogroll.

2024.01.15

New year, same me. It’s been ages since I last worked on anything remotely related to gamedev. The end of last year was marked for me with a pneumonia that brought to light my mild PTSD with being hospitalized due to my cancer treatment times. It was some really shitty weeks and I couldn’t focus on anything other than either getting better or dying, depending on my mood.

Today marks the start of the year for me, at least when it comes to being productive. I’ve setup a “Pomodoro-like” routine to try out and, if everything goes to plan (it usually doesn’t) I should have at least some stuff written down in an organized manner.

In regards of my last prototype, it’s shelved along with the others of this same solution. It’s been a really good thing to create different projects withing the same Visual Studio solution, using the same library, so I can just plug then in and out and test things without having to copy paste a lot of code; every shareable piece of code is in the library.

Anyway, hope I come back with better news the next time I remember I created this blog and sit down to write something.

2023.12.12

Things haven’t been going as planned; as usual. Even though I have been spending some time developing my project, my health has been taking some hits. I’m dropping the depression meds I’ve been taking for 4-5 years. It sucks ass. One of them is already gone, but the second one is really messing with my body.

I’m not doing this out of the blue; I’ve been unhappy with both my meds and my doctor for quite some time now. This is not the first medication I drop either: I stopped taking Zolpidem because I used it as an addiction drug for years, even though you’re not supposed to take it for more than 4 weeks (yes, my doctor knew I used it and they’re the one that gave me the prescriptions). It started to help my insomnia (that was long gone already) but I kept taking them to sleep each and every night, until I decided to stop because it was deeply messing me up. It wasn’t the first or second try that did it, but I’m free of it for a good year now. I want to do the the same for the other meds I take.

I really hope I’m not messing things up here.

On the gamedeving side, I pivoted my management sim to a roguelike. What I got excited about, really, was changing the scope of the game and still use the library I developed up until now. Usually I did this every couple of months apart, which rendered the library completely unknown to me and usually meant I’d build it up again and just reuse some code. This time I’m being able to improve the workflow and the way I think things independently of genre or trope. If I happen to pivot to another thing again (this is really plausible) I’ll be excited to improve it a little further.

Here’s a little screenshot of the current state of the project:

A high-contrast map of a woods with a text history panel.

This is the first time I’m messing with high-contrast, 1-bit pixel art. I got the inspiration both from Moonring and Kenney’s 1-bit Pack; you can actually see some of his furniture art being used on the screenshot.

This is it for today. I’m off to do some writing and hopefully have some notion of where to go from here.
Keep trying.