Qutting my Job / Rhythm Quest / Ludum Dare 48 / etc

Alright, it's been a while, so there is quite a lot to cover, probably across multiple posts.  Let's get into it.

On quitting my job

I quit my job last week!  I decided it was time for me to move on, specifically I want to take time to develop and publish "Rhythm Quest", an indie rhythm game that I worked on for a brief stint 2 years ago (I was also between jobs then).

I've made a good 30+ games in my time, with varying genres and degrees of quality, but I've never actually shipped and published a commercial game by myself before.  (All of my existing games are completely free)  Of course, when I say "shipping and publishing a commercial" game I don't just mean "raising the price of one of my free games to $1", I mean actually going through the motions of completing an entire project and releasing it as a commercial title.  Making a video game (in any regard) is remarkably difficult work, but given my experience it really seems quite within my realm of possibility, so it's something that I'd very much like to check off my proverbial bucket list.

So the plan is to take a short amount of time (some weeks) to take a break and catch up on stuff, then spend a few months (3-4?) working on Rhythm Quest and seeing how much of it I can get done, given that I'll hopefully be dedicating myself to it seriously (something I've never quite done before with this level of ambition).  Of course, we'll see where things go from there, but I don't want this to become some massive thing that ends up sucking a year or more of my time from me (and it shouldn't, if I'm doing things right).

Being unemployed (self-employed?) isn't in the cards for me long-term, this is more of a brief stint for me to do something that in all honestly feels like I "should have already done" at some point.

On my indie game project

One of the good things about Rhythm Quest (title is admittedly still tentative) is that a playable prototype/demo already exists, so it's not like I'm starting from the ground up (though I haven't opened this project in over a year, so there is definitely going to be some amount of inertia in getting it rolling again).

Rhythm Quest is, as you might imagine, a music-based game.  It's quite similar to Ripple Runner (RIP Flash), which itself won 2nd place in Ludum Dare and gained a bit of a cult following in Korea, so I know there has been an audience for this sort of thing.

The music, art, coding, and design is all being handled completely by myself, so it really will be a one-man project.  Interestingly enough, my skills in some of these areas (my pixel art in particular) has evolved over the course of the past 2 years.  A less-experienced game dev might feel an urge to "start over from scratch and do things better this time", but I've worked on enough things to know that that's not an attitude you want to adopt if you're to get anything real accomplished.

Rhythm Quest should be available for PC/Mac, iOS/Android, and.....=maybe= Switch (we'll see about that one).  There may be a web demo at some point as well (hey, it worked great for Rhythm Doctor!).

I am hoping to establish a sort of devlog of sorts -- the ones I've seen on the TIGSource forums have been rather inspiring -- so you can look forward to seeing those posts eventually.  But that's all later in the future, as I'm really not ready to start up the Rhythm Quest train again quite yet.  But it'll happen, of course.  You know how I am about finishing things that I started.

On Ludum Dare 48

The day immediately after quitting my job was the start of the 48th round of Ludum Dare, a weekend-long game jam where you're given 48 or 72 hours (depending on division) to create a game from scratch around a theme that is announced at the start of the jam.  This time the theme was "Deeper and deeper", and we made a whimsical adventure game about exploring a cat's dreams.

If you'd like to try the game in its current state, you can find it on the usual cocoamoss / ddrkirby sites, or on the LD site itself.  Else, we are hoping to iron out some of the content that we didn't really get to finish or polish up, and doing a more full-fledged release, so you can look out to hearing about that in the future.

One of our goals this time for LD was to play things a little more loosely in terms of not focusing so much on having a crystal clear picture of how everything in our game (particularly the narrative) would fit together in the end.  Trying to wrangle an incomplete idea into something perfect too early in the process frequently results in frustration, and I think that is something I/we have struggled with a bit in the past.  I myself used to struggle with this idea a lot in my songwriting process as well -- trying to introduce too much structure into the process at an early state tends to cut off creativity and lead to getting "stuck".  In music I've learned that it's best to trust my initial instincts and go with the flow rather than trying to force things into a certain (perfect) shape, and I think I'm perhaps beginning to learn that through the lens of game development as well.  Even though I would not consider myself to be a very "spontaneous" or "creative" person, I still do my best work when I feel free to chase after those threads that feel most exciting, rather than trying to lay down a concrete path to a specific destination.

On birthday stuff

My birthday passed without incident this year, perhaps more so than usual since we are still socially isolating in these areas.  Though, even without that, my birthday usually coincides pretty closely with the April LD event anyways.

I did end up celebrating by "doing a shot", and by that I mean getting my first vaccine dose.  Was a pretty interesting experience getting to wait in a line and people-watch a bit for the first time in a bit.

I disabled FB posting on my "profile" as I do every year, but funnily enough I cannot remember the last time anybody else even used this feature so it probably wouldn't even matter if it stayed permanently disabled.  I wouldn't be shocked if people literally only use this for people's birthdays.  People used to, you know, actually visit other people's online spaces?  But nowadays why would you do that when you can instead just plug into your fb/twitter feed of mostly-irrelevant-posts, doom-posting, memes, selfies, and news articles?  .........

Ok, moving on...

 

On life in general

Life is in a pretty good spot right now.  I mean, hard not to when I've got the liberty to "just relax" right now.  And by "just relax" I mean I've actually still got a dozen to-do items that I've been working on, one of which is these blog posts.  Business as usual in my life, really.  Like clockwork, I keep on ticking onward and onward; it's near-impossible for me not to.

Which reminds me, I -- amazingly -- somehow completely missed OHC last week.  I was more shocked than disappointed, as I don't think this has ever happened before in my history of ~400 OHC rounds.  Sure, I've definitely missed rounds before due to being in other countries, or had something else going on, or whatever, but I don't think I've ever just plain forgotten about it.  I think the past few weeks have seen me make a few more of these absent-minded mistakes for whatever reason.  This one in particular I think was because it was the last day of my job and I was busy trying to prep for Ludum Dare, so my mind probably just forgot that it was a Thursday.  Just goes to show you that even I am but a mere mortal sometimes.

On eating less meat

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm starting to go "half-vegetarian" to reduce my meat intake, for both practical and environmental reasons.  So far it's been....relatively smooth and unexciting, as I'm being pretty relaxed about it.  Cooking without meat is sort of a new sort of skill, so I've been learning and getting experience with new dishes like a red lentil dahl curry (Indian cuisine seems to unsurprisingly have a lot of great vegetarian options).  That one in particular was pretty exciting since it uses pretty much all shelf-stable ingredients.

So, I guess stay tuned for more reports on other dishes that work well for my new diet.  I've been eating a bunch of sichuan "fish-fragrant" braised eggplant recently, along with sichuan dry-fried green beans.  the green beans in particular have been pretty easy to make and pretty tasty in terms of flavor, so that one is pretty nice.

That's about it for updates, I think.  I'll maybe cover the other stuff later...