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2016: I Guess Part IV

2016: I Guess Part IV

October


Honestly from a lot of my posts it seemed like things were going well, but unfortunately a lot of my anxiety and depression issues were getting worse. Some things can temporarily bring me out of it, but what sucks is that my default state just seems to be being super anxious and or depressed.

I was able to make a fun little doodle though.

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My energy level dropped pretty significantly and work on Sky Sisters crawled. I wasn't able to muster up the productivity I had the month before, and the energy from PAX was worn off. One of the things I still wanted to add was a progress marker to the game so that players could see how far along they are until the next boss. This required me to dig into some internals of the game that I hadn't touched in a while so of course a bunch of stuff broke.

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Feeling severe burn out I decided to switch my focus for a little while. In the world of Pathfinder my party was using a PDF to track our character sheets. While this was working for us there was definitely space for improvement. Like one of our party members was always out of space for his items since he was carrying the bag of holding. I ran into the issue where my spell list out grew my sheet so I had to make a whole new one. It was just a pain to use most of the time so I decided to finally tackle a web based character sheet.

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It didn't take me long to get something up and running which felt nice. Working on something new can feel pretty refreshing, and also working on something that wasn't a game was actually relaxing. Web coding felt so easy compared to game coding.

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I still managed to get some doodles out too.

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November


One of the few Sky Sisters tasks I could muster this month was making some new palettes for the background. Yeah, really. I was still feeling so insanely burnt out.

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I spent a majority of this month on my Pathfinder character sheet web application. It was actually a lot of fun getting feedback from our game master and fellow players and improving it. I added an ultra compact view to get a quick glance at a character created with it.

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I also spent some time on a new Travel Pillow mock up if I ever get around to making such a game.

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And another random mock up for fun.

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I could still feel the heavy burn out. I'm not even sure if I'm out of it yet while writing this. I just kept working on the character sheet manager and doing some art stuff when I felt like it.

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December


Here we are at the end of the year already. I can't believe how fast it all flew by again. I had a little bit of energy to spare in Sky Sisters so I tried to kill off some last visual tasks.

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Some numbers for getting points, and some new effects for getting an upgrade.

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As an attempt to keep myself programming at least something I dove back into FNA stuff. By this point I was pretty much 100% done with my Pathfinder character sheet, and I already felt like I had spent more than enough time on it. On my trip back to FNA world I started to put together just a really simple platformer type thing with tiles and grid collision.

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The end of the month brought me back to Upstate New York to visit my family that I hadn't seen for some time. I skipped Christmas the year before, so it felt like I hadn't been home in forever.

When I got to New York I was convinced that I needed to take an actual break from everything. Except for doodling of course.

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Looking back at the year I can see why I would need a real break from all things work. I never actually take breaks, and being indie kind of means I'm always "at work." I'm never home from the office because home is the office, and the feeling of my career flying out the window when I'm not working is very real and crippling. I ended the year by just hanging out with my family and playing games. It was something I needed more than I knew, and when I returned to Denver I ended up extending the break even further.

There is advice that I hear a lot which is to take a break for as long as you need. Eventually you will feel the itch to get back to work, but sometimes it might be a while.

Okay this is becoming less and less of a recap so I better save it for the last part in which I offer profound reflections on the year passed. Maybe.
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