It's been a little rough lately, but that's something I'm attempting to work on together with my therapist.  We'll see if perhaps I'm on the come-up, or not.

Rhythm Quest

I managed to hit 500 wishlists, which of course is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, but still worth being happy over considering the relatively low amount of marketing power I have.

I've been able to continue chugging along with progress on levels despite not being in the greatest place in life, which has been comforting.  Yesterday I managed to put together the first level of world 4 and honestly, it's been surprising to me just how well I've been able to just sit down and try to make something, and have it actually work out well -- whether that be new music, mechanic experimentation, or backdrop artwork.

There are multiple theories as to why this could be the case, but regardless of the reason it's certainly been confidence-inspiring for me.  It could be because I've just already got such a good foundation to work off of...I've got rules in place for how to utilize color palettes throughout my levels, for example.  But even when I tried out a different style of music for world 4, it seemed to just go well without a hitch.

I honestly think a big part of it is just that I'm...simply more skilled at my craft.  More experience has made it easier for me to tackle new challenges.  You can imagine drawing an analogue to cooking -- if you're inexperienced, you might have a few specific recipes comfortably under your belt, but you might struggle more with something that you aren't familiar with.  But after so much accumulated expertise, it's much easier to just throw together something that's still good even if you're unfamiliar with a specific dish/combination, or if you're missing some ingredients.

I think I've been feeling the same thing with my other crafts -- probably to nobody's surprise since I've been at it for so long.  Experimenting during OHC every single week really helps with that, of course -- every week you do something different, and after a while I've started to sometimes really use that opportunity to push out into new and different directions.  This song, for example, is one in which I'm very very heavily leveraging Valhalla Supermassive (a unique and fun reverb plugin) to make otherwise simple sounds really wash over the soundscape and echo everywhere.

Similarly, I feel more confident when I'm trying to come up with new backdrops for Rhythm Quest levels.  Before I sit down it definitely still feels like it's going to be a crapshoot because I don't really have a solid idea of what I'm going to do, but somehow I've just been able to come up with various decent things and not have it be a disaster.

There's more stuff I should probably be polishing up to ensure that the playable demo is nice and presentable, but for now I'm taking this current momentum and just running along with making more levels while I can.

Pokemon Unite

They fixed the exp bug, and it actually does seem like games are a little less snowball-y now, so that's good.  Even if you in particular weren't hit by it, you could just have teammates who were just stuck as a charmander (it's always the charmander...) or wartortle or something because they got ganked early.  Perhaps now you still need to weight teamfighting and showing up for objectives a little more highly as opposed to prioritizing safe farm over everything else, but maybe it's a good middle ground now?

Stuff Coming Up

There actually seems to be quite a bit, actually.  A small gathering, and hair dying, and another meetup after that as well.  And then Fanime is already going to be in a little over a week.  Another friend is visiting from out of town, and then in July I'm going to see if I can finally do the GMTK game jam.  At some point later I have to start packing my stuff up as well.  Got a commissioned piece to do at some point in the next month, but it's just one.

Not really bad...it's not like everything is all happening at once, and not a lot of stress involved probably.  Honestly, it'll probably be a good pace for me overall.

I'll be trying to enter the ALTTPR Go Mode Podcast Mentor tournament as well, which should be fun / healthy for me as well.  At the moment it's just signup and you have to run two async aptitude seeds for them to judge/check your skill level.  I did one so far, which didn't go perfectly but honestly I can't ask for much better.  Will be doing the other one in the coming week or so and then we'll see just how things actually go...

That's about it for now I think...