Posted by MK Fell on Sep 01, 2024
(not actually starbucks i promise i'm just saying it for the meme)
hey y'all. turns out unemployment is extremely detrimental to both mental and creative health! who knew, right?
truth be told, even if i hadn't been unemployed for a full year (four months of 2022 and eight of 2023) i was already extremely burned out on ttrpg design. i look at where i was in the last hello post i made and the progress i made on, well, any game since then and the answer is "truly negligible". oh, sure, i've had a lot of ideas and thoughts and half-formed dreams, but the prospect of quote enquote "marketing", "self-promotion", etc, got so so draining that it truly became not worth it. couple that with, you know, a full year of unemployment related financial stress and i ended up just-- watching movies, reading books, playing video games instead. (which, to be clear, are all valid and valuable creative endeavors, and i do feel like it has done wonders for my creative work now).
i'm saying all this because 1. i think it's worth being transparent when it comes to lulls in art and work and 2. i like to overshare anyway. this wouldn't necessarily require me coming back to comradery, apart from the fact that it's been a while since i've used this and i WOULD like to talk about the stuff i'm doing if i have this. but! a funny thing has happened to me in the last two weeks:
i started writing another game.
IT HAPPENS, OKAY. sometimes you start recording a new actual play podcast, realize you grate heavily against the system, and you and your fellow player start hacking a full length campaign game. i am not beating the "all my games are hacks" allegations anytime soon. anyway, jacqueline and i are tearing forged in the dark to pieces right now, and i'm pretty pleased about the components we've put together. i'm not going to say much more about it here because it's still in early stages (specifically "mk just rambling in a google doc for 4000 words and jacqueline nodding along") but it's shaping up to be something really interesting.
what i WILL say is that trying to come up with a title for THAT game prompted me to decide i want to write a wrestling match time loop game called "time loop draw" which feels a little cheesy but i like the mouthfeel of it. anyway take with that what you will.
beyond that, let's see... i might go back to the other games i've had sitting half-finished for the last year and a half. they include:
- a kingdom hearts, specifically khux, inspired descended from the queen game
- a faction hack of time to drop
- a spindlewheel-fiasco worldbuilding game
- the together/alone hack that's just me saying "hey what if tanis was Good" (i have a LOT of opinions about pacific northwest stories) (this game's text might also end up in twine, but don't quote me on that.)
i've also been spending some time recently learning renpy. this is for the sake of an interstitial fanfiction, but it's nice to know that i Have the skill in case one of the story ideas i have rattling around in this ol' brain of mine translates into visual novel form (that's not super Likely, given my brain's inability to translate thought into visual art, but i can dream).
at some point before the end of the year i plan to sit down and do some game text maintenance i've been putting off (changing dead names in the acknowledgements sections, fixing the graphics in this is a game about wrestling, probably something else i'm forgetting) but i gotta like Devote A Day to that. probably this coming month. i'll put it on my calendar. the text of the games themselves shouldn't change-- i won't do something like that without warning. so keep an eye!
in any case i think that's all i have. just me saying hey, i'm alive, and i might be kicking at games again. let's see how long this lasts!