This was not the best week for my mental health. Let’s start with the positives: I didn’t have to take a sick day, and still got a fair bit done; outside of work I not only did some more research for Stony Faced, but I also this evening began work on another hobby project, this one a little more outside my comfort zone but I’ll get to that in a bit; I did my finances and found yes, I am in a better position than I expected to be. And most of all, I made it to the end of the week in one piece. So great right? Yeah, no. I’ve felt ill all week, can’t sleep, had to order in food as I ran out and lacked the energy to walk to the shop to get more, didn’t have the batteries to hang out with friends and oh look, I’m blogging right before midnight again so guess what also took until the last minute to do today?
I’m just gonna chalk this one up to poor timing. A lot of high-stress events piled up on me and left me at the point of breaking, and yes I didn’t break so that should be praised, but I mean, what did I expect to feel like after that? Elation takes energy I just don’t have right now. But I do have one small thing of note, which is that now, officially, NHO is no longer my shortest in-progress book. It’s now beginning the slow climb to the finish line, leaving poor TUS in its wake. Actually I say poor TUS but that book is starting to find its voice now I feel, and I have about the same confidence in it as TFS now. That’s a big deal, because while yes it still needs a lot of work, it’s no longer the straggler of the series it once was. Now that title belongs to TWR alone, and an honorary mention to the train wreck that is the Horizon series.
But I mentioned yet another project, so what’s that about? Well, I finally decided to stop just talking about my interest in games development and start building one. Bear in mind, I am learning Game Maker Studio as I go so it’s not going to be a quick thing, but I already have the scope of my minimum viable product sketched out, and I don’t think that’s going to take a ton of time to realise in a very crude form. No name yet, but the premise is pretty simple: magical fishing adventure. No really. It’s a game where you fish, you build your local community a lil like Stardew, and its secondary genre is a point and click with some fishing based puzzles. No fixed ending so much as a host of little things to discover as you go. The MVP is gonna just be a small ‘village’ with different spots to fish, and different minigames for the different fish. Its primary audience is me, as I’m using the same logic as my books: make it for myself, and if someone else likes it, cool.