Depression stuff / Freespace 1 vs Freespace 2

Okay blog.  Maybe I should spend some more time with you these days.  Maybe we'd best just get back to basics.  I think part of why blogging felt so vital to me in the old days of yore was perhaps because it's a good way of bearing witness to your own feelings, thereby helping you detach from all of the ---- you may have been going through at the time.  And yeah, there was a lot of it, at that time.

 

Anyways, it's been an odd couple of days.  I've felt off, for a couple of different reasons, which I won't really go into here, so I took the day off for myself.  Interestingly enough a lot of the problem I've been having recently is "not knowing what to do with myself", as in I'll have some chunk of the day to spend but I wouldn't really know what I "should" be doing with that time.

This feels slightly different than what I was feeling before in previous months, where I "couldn't decide whether I should be working or trying to relax".  I think the solution to =that= one was to just try to schedule a healthy mix (in advance, if possible), but also to detach and realize that the entire problem is sort of a humorous lose-lose proposition in the first place.  It's like yeah, you can "stress out about not relaxing enough", but that's sort of gets to be oxymoronic?

Right now, though I think it's more of an empty feeling.  In my vocabulary I'd actually just call this "depression" as it fits the ticket of "you don't really feel motivated to do things that previously warranted excitement".  Though of course there are different flavors of depression, even in my labeling.

Contrary to some plebeian beliefs, depression is not "cured" by simply "going and having fun".  The whole problem in the first place is that you aren't really getting as much excitement and/or joy out of things, so it doesn't necessarily really help to go and do "fun things".  In some earlier years I would feel this state of mind acutely at social dance events and would always feel irked when people seemed to have the attitude of wanting to pull people into a happy-go-lucky energy.  I mean, they're not in the wrong; some people really do just need that, it's just not what I happened to need at the time.

Physical activity =has= empirically proven to be helpful though (at least for me), so I guess that is probably in my future.  Other than that, there is not actually a ton of different home remedies and solutioning to be done other than simply being kind to myself and trying to practice self-compassion, as well as what I like to call "setting yourself up for success".  By that I usually mean taking steps to make sure you are creating an environment in which you are more likely to succeed...which could be as simple as "avoid things that bring negativity".

 

Moving onto other news...I've finished playing through all of the Freespace 2 campaign.  This is my first time seeing most of it, actually, as I think I probably only remember the first few missions back when I first encountered Freespace/Freespace 2 way back in the day.  Overall Freespace 2 is sort of a mixed bag when it's compared to Freespace 1.  It's hard to say whether it's a stronger package overall or not.

On the one hand, Freespace 2 does feel slightly more refined in terms of ship combat.  All the basics are still the same, and the weapon loadout is actually not =too= different, but at least we don't have the problem of the Avenger being the best gun AND unlocked super early.  There's a lot more (reasonable) tradeoffs to be had among the best set of primary weapons now, which is good.  There's also a more varied ship selection, with one part of the campaign even having you pilot some Vasudan crafts, which is a nice changeup.  Overall the weapons and craft just feel stronger on all sides, which felt nice.  I think it gave you a bit more agency as the player, as with the Kayser guns you can really start mowing down fighters and bombers quickly, and with the Maxim cannon you can help take out larger ships in a more active way without needing to pilot a sluggish bomber.  Overall I got the feeling that less of the Freespace 2 missions were "annoying", though there were still some of course.

There are some "secret special ops" missions which have you going undercover as a sort of double-agent infiltrating an enemy organization, which were an excellent change of pace.  But yeah, overall I think the missions were somehow just more enjoyable to me in Freespace 2.

Where Freespace 2 falls a bit more flat for me is in the story and overall progression of the campaign.  I wonder if part of this is something about the development being rushed towards the end or something (?), as it feels like they set up a lot of narrative threads that never really ended up bearing fruit.  The final mission in particular has you fighting what seems to be an unlimited number of Shivan bombers and fighters as the Terran fleet tries to run away from the Shivan armada.  The idea of fighting a massive onslaught of Shivans is awesome; the problem is that the rest of your entire squad ends up dying after about 5 minutes of dogfighting, meaning the comms channel is devoid of the usual "check your six!" "nice kill!" chatter, and you have to spend the entire second half of the mission without anyone to order around and help you (I think there are some Vasudan fighters helping out, but they aren't part of your squad?), all while command is yelling at you because all of the defenseless transports are getting their butts blown off.  And to cap all that off, the Shivans make the sun go supernova for some unexplained reason, and the closing cutscene basically goes "what were the Shivans doing?  We'll never know.  Are we safe for now?  Only time will tell." which is not really a satisfying resolution.

Freespace 1 in contrast had an excellent sort of progression, where first you were fighting the Vasudans, then having first contact with the Shivans, feeling like you were screwed because of their superior technology, then finally claiming the means to fight back, culminating in an epic showdown where you (literally you) need to fly around in a bomber and take out the big bad Shivan capital ship.  Now, that last mission is not really that FUN to play, but you can't argue that it's an epic tale with a satisfying conclusion.  It really didn't feel that way in Freespace 2, and I know that there are some leftover unused internal set pieces in some of the later levels, so I have to wonder if they simply ran out of time and had to cut things short.

So I guess in a few words, Freespace 2 was a bit more enjoyable, but Freespace 1 was definitely more memorable.

Anyways, I'm checking that one off my list, woohoo!  I've still been playing through Terranigma from time to time, and I'm not sure if I just don't "get" the game but I =really= can't see how this is supposedly the superior game when compared to Illusion of Gaia.

I played a few Space Alert missions too...that was fun.  I finally got around to transferring all of my mission log data to excel spreadsheets with nice formulas and everything, so I'm looking forward to perhaps getting back into that a little more.

 

There's other stuff to write about too, but I'll call it there for now.  Perhaps I'll be back for more sooner rather than later.

Soulless corporations should be the only ones producing art, then we could at least protect creators from having to deal with the vitriol of the entitled masses.

It's strange that people can bemoan the loss of childhood innocence while berating others for acting too childish.

It's strange when the people who complain about others being too lazy to find answers online are the same ones that cannot be bothered to read YouTube video descriptions.

Things are strange sometimes.

How old were you when you realized that you were not the protagonist of the world?  Not even the protagonist of your world.

It seems that many of us have yet to learn this lesson.

Things have been okay, I guess.

There was another goodbye.  I guess it is perhaps fitting that it fell on the same week that I wrote one of my annual letters-that-will-probably-never-get-read-or-replied-to.  It is interesting, in the grand scope of things, to think about which goodbyes impact me the most and which brush off without too much meaning.  So often we don't really even get the chance to say goodbye in the first place, until perhaps we finally realize that someone is truly gone.  Does the goodbye make things easier, or harder?  Would things have been different, if they had truly said goodbye all those years ago?  And even if they did, would I even have been able to accept it?

I've played through more of Terranigma and I'm beginning to think that this game is perhaps overrated.  Illusion of Gaia was an enjoyable experience, even having already played it before, but I'm not really getting the same feeling with Terranigma.  The characters and world are less interesting, the combat feels clunky despite having more options, the dungeons don't feel as enjoyable, and the cutscenes would be a slog to get through without a fast-forward function.  I'm still ok going through with it, but so far I haven't really been too impressed with what I've seen.  We'll see how it goes for the rest of it, but afterwards I'm ready to just move onto playing Mega Man X2 or something.

In the meantime I've been playing Descent: Freespace, as well Silent Threat -- or more accurately, Silent Threat: Reborn.  You see, Freespace has an open-source port now, based on the Freespace 2 engine, and the first game (The Great War) as well as Silent Threat have both been ported over to the new open-source engine -- with Silent Threat being completely revamped.

Freespace is an interesting game, probably the most well-known of these sorts of space sims (they seem to have fallen out of favor, I guess?).  One major flaw of the game is the varying difficulty in the different missions, particularly those with secondary objectives and/or bonuses, especially when they involve protecting other craft or some sort of time limit.  I found myself altering the difficulty level frequently to get past some of the harder ones.  The final mission in the first game also suffers from the issue where the suggested loadout doesn't really work out, as the rest of the bombers in your squadron never end up getting the job done on higher difficulties, so you're forced to fly in a bomber and blow up the 5 reactors yourself.  The problem is that you need to use the same ship and loadout that you flew in the previous (and lengthy) mission, so it's sort of a feel-bad moment when you finally realize that you need to go and do it all over again.  I imagine that the freespace open port authors and the silent threat revamp and associated projects probably have tried to do a better job at maintaining consistent difficulty, but I still found some missions to be way harder than others, even in Silent Threat.

The other problem with Freespace in general that I'm seeing is that the experience does tend to be rather one-note.  There is =some= variety, in that you are sometimes dogfighting other fighters, sometimes attacking larger cruisers, sometimes trying to defend ships from attack, sometimes trying to disable the engines of a large capital ship.  But in most cases 90% of the action is basically dogfighting other space fighters, even when it's in service to some larger goal.  There's a ton of different mission setups, but not really so much in terms of "level design" as say, Descent 1 / 2, since, well....then missions are flown in free space -- that's the whole premise of the series, anyways.

The good thing is that the dogfighting really is done quite well, and there were some moments during the Great War campaign where I really =felt it=.  Large cruisers fight off against each other as a dozen fighter pilots from both sides fly by, chasing each other.  You've got an enemy fighter in your sights and you maneuver as best you can to track it with your primary beam weapons as it twists and turns, flaring its afterburners.  The missile lock signal chimes and you launch an interceptor missile, which finds its mark and blows your now-shieldless target to pieces.  "Nice shot!", one of your squadmates calls out over the comm, but your computer has already targeted another hostile and you sweep your view to go on the hunt again, triggering your afterburners lest you become an opportune target by remaining still for too long.

So yeah it's been relatively enjoyable, but I will say that the weapon loadout and ship selection does get a little stale and I think that is something that could really have been improved (perhaps it is in FS2, I don't remember quite enough to recall).  This is doubly true in Silent Threat, which -- as an expansion to the first game -- features only a few new weapons which are mostly ineffectual.  Most of the weapons in freespace 1, in fact, have quite limited use.  The Avenger is the second new gun that you unlock (after the basic basic laser, and the disruptor) and it's actually the best primary weapon overall throughout the entire game, as it does comparable hull DPS to the Prometheus, fires faster, does more shield damage, and takes less energy.  At least the missile/secondary weapons have a little more in the way of nice tradeoffs, as they each have their own specialized roles (huge slow missiles for targeting capital ships, medium-sized missiles for targeting bombers, and fast small lock-on missiles for dogfighting agile fighters).  But it would have been nice to have more variance in the primary weapons, even if it was just cycling through a sequence of strict upgrades.  Ships are sort of the same way -- they've each got their strengths and weaknesses, which is great, but after a while there's not really any more new toys to play with.  And I think consistently having new toys to play with every couple of missions would really help to reduce the feeling of same-ness.  Silent Threat at least had the shield breaker weapon, which seems useful as a complement to the avenger, and an interesting mechanical changeup in that they introduced enemy fighters which can't be targeted by your ship's computer and thus need to be identified by sight.  Your computer also can't shot-lead for you for these ships, so you need to correct for their velocity by eye.  It's a neat mechanic, though I wish the ships were colored a little more distinctly so I didn't have to always just spam the "try to target thing under my crosshair" to ensure that I wasn't about to open fire on a friendly ship.

I finished up the final mission of the main Pharaoh campaign a while ago -- it lasted quite a while, given that you need to build the largest pyramid in the entire game, as well as build a huge city while you're at it.  I was pretty happy with how I ended up, though I found it hilarious just how many jugglers I needed in my city in order to meet the required culture rating for my large population.  I ended up just having a huge plaza full of nothing but juggling booths in the middle of the land...  Anyways, the Cleopatra expansion missions will be next, but I've taken a break from that for the time being.

Work on Rhythm Quest continues and is going...actually pretty well despite basically needing to take a week or so off from it due to other life stuff getting in the way.  I've been making Friday my weekly devlog-writeup day as a way to show off what I worked on in the week and also as a way to do something a little lighter and stress-free.  There's still a ton to get done, of course, but seeing myself be able to make notable progress is always good.  Now if only I could get to the point of feeling the same way about Far Side of the Mirror...

Been inputting more data from the handwritten "Making My Day Logs" into digital form.  I've gotten through all of the high school years and am into my sophomore year at college now, it seems like.

Finished all of the "night mode" songs on Rhythm Doctor.  I'm happy I went through the game when I did, as it was good reference material for thinking about mechanics for my own game (which is admittedly a different sort of beast).  Again I can't help but think "surely I can make just as many if not more levels than this", but also at the same time "please god it better not take 7 years for me to make 30 levels", ha ha ha.  It's interesting though, I feel like looking at Rhythm Doctor and ADoFaI together you can really see that they have a certain "style" to them.  No, I don't just mean the fact that they're both one-button rhythm games, silly.....I mean the pacing and presentation of the mechanics and their associated levels.  It's sort of like how Undertale and Deltarune both share a sort of similar pacing to their humor and storytelling, you can really recognize toby fox's characteristic "style" in both of these games.  I feel like it's the same way for Rhythm Doctor and adofai, you can sort of begin to recognize after playing these two games, "oh yeah, this is the 7thbeat games way of doing things".  I think it's especially apparent to me because I can say for sure that if I were the one making this game I would have done a lot of things differently.  But that's why I'm making Rhythm Quest and not Rhythm Doctor ;P

Of course, you might wonder whether I also have a distinct "style" in the games that I make.  Putting aside the obvious caveat that the DDRKirby(ISQ) games and the Cocoa Moss games basically have separate artistic and mechanical identities, I do think there is sort of a stylistic commonality.  The Cocoa Moss games tend to have a way of blending familiar elements with something that is a bit off-the-wall (which makes perfect sense given the nature of the team).  Birdie Burglars, for example, is just a shooting-gallery game, but the meowmies add a sort of different vibe and mechanic to it.  Hide and Seek is pretty standard fare, but it tries to do something new with the audio / "listening" mechanic.  Nyamo's Adventure is a really standard Metroidvania exploration adventure, but the transformation forms are a little unexpectedly charming.

The DDRKirby(ISQ) games are a lot closer to just being "standard fare", which is of course also to be expected.  Although you could say that Ripple Runner is innovative, it's not innovative in the sense of being completely unexpected and off-the-wall.  It's a natural synthesis of things that are already well-established (rhythm games, platforming).  There are certain mechanics in Ripple Runner (speed changes and the long jumps in stage 2) that if anything I would say are actually atypical of my style; I don't tend to enjoy "cool unexpected unexplained new things", especially in music charting design.  I want to just take a basic concept and just execute it really well in a way that I know best.

You can sort of feel that Rhythm Doctor has a sort of design philosophy of always trying to throw something new at you.  I quote:

"...in some cases a boss level might have taken hundreds of hours to iterate and perfect. 'There’s tons of concepts and even full levels that we threw away, a lot of times it’s because the level isn’t delightful or surprising enough,'

'It gets difficult to squeeze out the surprise from a simple mechanic, but I think that struggle is also necessary. I read somewhere that the writing team behind Breaking Bad held to that principle of writing without looking ahead too much — they’d write themselves into a corner that they had no idea how to get their characters out of, and then sit in the writing room and struggle until they figured out something. The end result would be surprising to them, and as a result, surprising to the viewers too. I guess we ended up following that philosophy by sticking so adamantly to our constraints.'"

Rhythm Quest, and my games in general, I think take a different approach.  Of course, I hope that Rhythm Quest will be delightful to new players, and that each time a new mechanic is presented, it would be great if there is a moment of "whoa, that's so cool!".  But that initial impression isn't necessarily the end-goal, it's simply the ramp-up to the core experience of zoning out and flowing to the rhythms like you would in DDR or IIDX or any of these other rhythm games.  It's important to me that each level offer something different, but it's not important to me that each level offer something =qualitatively= different.  Whereas I think that qualitative difference seems very important to the design of Rhythm Doctor.  As an overgeneralization, I do think this sort of obviously speaks to my approach to life as a whole, so it's not very surprising to see...

Music Stuff

Every once in a while there's a track that comes along and just blows me away and I listen to it over and over again trying to piece apart and decipher any clues about how exactly it was constructed to be so damn good.  This time it happens to be the song "Worn Out Tapes", from the Unbeatable OST, and also featured as a bonus level in Rhythm Doctor:

https://peakdivide.bandcamp.com/track/worn-out-tapes

Music has elements of both "art" and "craft" in that there are aspects of producing a song that are a little more technical in nature (mixing, mastering, etc.) as well as elements that are more creative in nature (arrangement, sound design, melodies and harmonies, rhythm selection).  That is not to say that the technical aspects are cut-and-dry, good-and-bad, because there are many different schools (and "non-schools") of thought regarding them, but at the very least you can argue that they are a little easier to approach in a replicable manner.

The creative aspects are a different beast altogether.  Like with any artform, you can of course template your decisions here on the styles of other artists, and that is in fact what most (?) people do, frequently drawing from multiple complementary traditions in order to synthesize something new.  My own sound borrows heavily from traditional chiptune, but also draws influence from trance music in the way that it heavily uses repetition and layering, as well as anthemic choruses and simple chord structures.

I've said before that music is one of the rare things in life that I feel =truly= excited about, in that my anticipation and desire for exploring new creations and expressions actually manages to surpass my constant regulatory circuit that shunts down new ideas that are too impractical to achieve given my other goals.  Of course, my approach to music is still slow and steady, but it is extremely rare for me to find a subject matter in life where I =will= say, "Yes, I want to do that, and that, AND that, and THAT, too, I want to do it ALL."

I have of course tried countless times to replicate and emulate the styles of other artists.  I went through a long phase of trying to emulate she_music, for example.  This was a phase when I tried to make heavier use of global sidechains, trim down on the reverb effects, and throw in a lot more 8-bit sound effect everywhere.  There was the phase where I was trying to achieve the sound of BT in This Binary Universe, using odd meters, tons of glitching, and less chiptune sounds in favor of instruments like mallet sounds and dulcimers.  There have been experiments with 16-bit sounds trying to emulate SNES soundtracks, stabs at making lo-fi chillhop, synthwave, attempts to sound like Puru, etc.

In the end I almost never manage to quite reach a perfect emulation of the original feel of the source material -- because, of course, so many different things go into making a track.  It's hard to replicate every last thing, especially when you don't have access to the materials nor the process that were originally used.  But these are always worthwhile experiments in their own right because of their ability to increase my musical vocabulary and explore new worlds.

There is so much going into this track here, it's daunting to even begin to decompose it into its constituent parts.  There's a lot of varied sounds, lots of different sections with different stuff going on in each, there's a lot of transition effects, lots of different things going on in the drums, etc.  But in the end I think a lot of it lies in the powerful riffs with heavy focus on syncopated accents -- this is something that is especially highlighted in the Rhythm Doctor chart for this song.  These riffs are played at a fast tempo (150 BPM) along with energetic drum patterns that are almost DnB-esque, along with general solid production.

But really the core of it is these riffs with syncopated accent patterns.  I think if there's anything for me to really take away and try to digest, it's those.  They're everywhere, with different types of syncopations, and I think there's a certain energy and feel that comes out of them that really drives the song along in a different way than I've felt before.  The little breaks in the song are "nothing special" -- they're good of course, but they're easier for me to understand since breaks in-between high intensity sections are a tried-and-true technique even for my own sound.

Ugh, everything here just sounds so good.  As someone who has been producing for 15+ years and has made some objectively really good stuff, let me tell you, even among us experienced producers, there are definitely stuff that just feels forever out of our reach.  I'm sure there are people who probably feel that way about my work, too.  There's so much for all of us to learn and to create.

I think one of the reasons that I am so proud of my track "Memoirs of a Whale" is that it represents a song where I deviated from my own style to create a new synthesis, and I didn't just half-ass it.  I went the full distance and put the time and effort into that track to really take it all the way, and I really delivered on what I wanted it to be.  It wasn't just another 9-bit chiptune track where I came up with a catchy riff and dialed in the rest of the elements.  I mean, those are valuable in their own right, too, but those ones will never compare to the achievement that this song represents.

As much as I'd like to give up, there is still work to be done.  And there are those that don't even have the choice to keep going.  So, I guess tomorrow, we steel ourselves and dig in.  Coming up for air when we need to.

Phantom Hits

In SSBM there's a phenomenon known as a "phantom hit", where if your attack only just =barely= connects with the hurtboxes (hurtbubbles, actually) of an opponent, you get an attack that still does damage but ends up doing zero knockback.

Thinking about people's reactions (both their words and their visceral emotions) to phantom hits in melee has always been really interesting for me.  It's a weird phenomenon where the player feels as if they were "robbed" of a clean hit and I think this is largely because the sfx of the hit still plays, as well as the damage of the hit still occurring.  The crazy thing to me is that people seem to consistently adopt this "glass half empty" interpretation of the phenomenon rather than the flipside, which is to see it as "well, this attack normally would have missed entirely, but in this case you were close, so you still got a reward").

There are people who will cry for "phantom hits to be removed" because of some infuriating game-losing instance where they missed a crucial hit (a jiggs rest, or a marth tipper, are the most common examples).  For the large part I'd assume most of these people probably get more upset about other things (being wobbled...random twitter beef), but it still really interests me how universal of a reaction this seems to be anectodally.

What if these complaints got their wishes answered, except instead of turning all phantom hits into clean hits, we just turned all phantom hits into flat-out missed attacks?  The ironic thing is that people would probably feel happier that their attacks are "missing less often", when in reality their attacks would be missing more often.  A kind of logical fallacy at play, if you will.  It's fascinating because if you think about it, it makes perfect sense that people would feel this way; it's only through a level of rationalization that you can detach yourself from that kind of thinking.

Of course, technically you could argue that phantom hits should =logically= be considered to be on the side of a hit rather than a miss.  This is because if you dig into the actual game logic, a phantom hit occurs when the hitbox DOES overlap, but only by 0.01 units or less.  So in that sense, the hit spheres should theoretically indicate a hit.  But I'm almost certain that hardly anyone actually knows this; they just have an emotional reaction to the sfx playing and the damage still occurring.  Imagine that melee was coded differently, for example, such that the "phantom hit bubble" was simply a separate, larger bubble than the actual hit sphere.

When this sort of thing comes up I'm constantly reminded of the scene from Mighty Ducks, which I wrote about back in 2012.  This is the scene where coach Gordon is thinking back to when he goes for the penalty-shot win-and-in goal and it bounces off the rim and doesn't score.  He says "A quarter of an inch this way and it would have gone in.  A quarter of an inch, Charlie."  And Charlie just says "Yeah, but a quarter inch the other way and you’d have missed completely."  It was just one single side scene in the movie, but that really stuck with me ever since.  That feeling of "being so close" is a common thing, and I feel like it's rare that people see things from the flipped perspective.

Well, dose #2 knocked me down =hard=, not only did I feel generally sick like I wanted to die, but also had pretty severe nausea and vomited multiple times the night of.  Thankfully that's all over with.

I've been continuing to try and plug along at working on my indie game, Rhythm Quest.  I actually wasn't doing so great last week as I was feeling a bit stressed about the project, as well as some other work on my plate, though I had a very productive work session on Monday which left me feeling better about things.  I took some time on Monday to do some exercise/moving around as well, which I think made a big difference; sometimes it can really help to engage physically in something I guess.

I ended up finishing a feature which I had been thinking about off and on in the interim of the two years since I last seriously worked on the game, so that's definitely nice, and it was also nice to kindle the familiar feeling of actually working on the core game in an exciting way -- something I admittedly haven't been as in touch with over the past few weeks of ramp up, automation work, and setup (though that has been largely by choice to some extent).  Anyways, I guess I'm taking today/tomorrow more or less off from work as a reward as well as to ensure that I'm taking good care of my mental health.  I didn't do much of anything today besides finish another mission in Pharaoh and chat with a good friend for a while, but that didn't really necessarily feel like a bad thing.  I think I was feeling pretty poorly and was also feeling a bit more stress than I would have liked, so I think it stands to reason that I should try and ease off a bit.  It's sort of a unique challenge I guess, to be working for myself, but at the same time it's really not.  Just feels like I'm going through all of the normal difficulties with any new job, in terms of finding the right structure and rhythm, setting expectations for myself, and all that stuff.

I'm getting quite proficient at doing things well in the Pharaoh missions, and have been feeling more confident about my cities.  I have a very defined yet flexible regular housing block that I use all over the place now, and in this last mission I didn't run into a ton of problems with lacking goods/etc.  I guess it certainly doesn't help that in this mission money is incredibly abundant.  The only issue I really had was with distributing multiple types of food to my houses, though that was partially due to the hunting lodges bugging out and starting to be really inconsistent at some point.  I think it was a mistake this mission to try and rely on distributing multiple types of food to a majority of housing, as that isn't really sustainable for large populations if you're relying on food imports.  I should just settle for slightly downgraded housing and just build one or two more blocks.

I did all of the in-game prophecies for Hades, =including= learning to play the damn lyre (finally), so I guess I've put that game to rest now, unless for some reason I want to see every single piece of dialogue or I want to farm for meaningless ranks or whatever (no thanks).  Twas quite an enjoyable experience, which I guess is not really a surprise at all.  Though I do find myself wondering whether I should have played on hard mode, as I really breezed through a lot of it without a ton of trouble.  Not that that is really a bad thing -- added difficulty is only fun up to a certain point, at which point it just becomes a tedious grind like Dead Cells 5BC, ugh.

Finished the main missions on Rhythm Doctor and I was right, it actually ended fairly quickly.  Makes me more hopeful about Rhythm Quest in a way, knowing that it's only got 16 main levels split across 4 worlds, and people eat that up.  Of course, it's not really a fair comparison, since the Rhythm Dr levels are way more involved than my levels are going to be, but it's a nice sort of confidence booster seeing a successful game and then knowing that I'm already planning on having more worlds and levels than that.  But of course, that's also still not really a fair comparison because I haven't played most of the night-side levels of Rhythm Dr, so really it's more like 32 levels total, sooooo maybe I'm not too far off.

I watched all of the new Higurashi Gou series, to some mixed reactions.  It was I guess nice ("nice" is a strange word to apply to a show with this much violence) to have something to just watch when I was still feeling groggy and not really at all like working on anything, but not all of it was particularly pleasant and it does feel like some sort of artistic sensibility was lost somewhere along the road.  But regardless of its potential flaws it was certainly interesting, and put forth some very cool questions, especially around the middle of it all.  I guess this'll be on hold for me until later when they air the next season in July or whatever, as I have no plans to go and read the manga/vn side of things or whatever.  Reminds me that my TLOU2 playthrough is also still on hold.  Yet another gruesome work that the jury is still out on, ha ha ha...

I jotted down GMTK jam (Game Maker's Toolkit game Jam) a while ago on my calendar as it looked like a game jam that's grown quite a lot in popularity and shares the same "at home, over a weekend" vibe of Ludum Dare, perhaps with better management and an actual functional game jam site (sigh...), and even with more of a chance of getting an actual feature or shoutout if you do well.  But sadly the cards are just not in it for me, as it just doesn't make sense at all for me to partake in it.  Too soon after LD (we're still trying to work on the last game?), and I feel a need to really focus on Rhythm Quest at the moment, etc etc.  Feels like sort of a shame, but at the same time, it doesn't really either.  Maybe next year, I guess, who knows.

Pop'n Music has been great and I have been slowly working my way through more charts.  My at-first-rapid improvement has slowed down by now so I'm not just going through a ton of level 33 charts and will probably move up to level 34 at some point.

Mm, I guess that's probably it for now.