Only Way Out is Through

Things always work out. As it happens, things today worked out in a way that led me to updating the blog! Finally!

But I was, I suppose, a victim of circumstance even before today.

Reading from my previous posts, it’s easy to see I was not in a great place. Emotionally or with other people, really. Since then, I’ve done a lot of work on myself – I worked out, I hung out with people, I pursued new interests and – maybe – most importantly – I got some help I needed for a long time. I’m on anti-depressants for the past five(?) or so months, and I can’t sing enough praises, honestly. It’s one of those things that just worked for me. Started waking up with a renewed sense of purpose. I’m active, I’m focused, I’ve managed to push away the thoughts that once led me to the edge and almost ruined me completely. I genuinely feel like a new person.

I feel good.

In August, the main creative output for was my participation on the O2A2 2024 Jam. To those unfamiliar, it’s a game jam where you create a visual novel feature one of every type of asset (1 background, 1 character, 1 music track, etc.) My entry was called Late Night at the KWL.

It’s about someone remembering their time at a radio station. The station specialized in airing out stories, which the protagonist and another character, Hazel, had to come up with. The story features their final brainstorming session.

This was pretty neat! The main challenge was sticking close to the 1000 word limit. Never been good at those and I probably never will. Fun, nevertheless.

Another august highlight was my participation in the GMTK2024 jam. There, I submitted a little game called Death of the King, where you’re a ruler of a kingdom of mechs, and your goal is to keep yourself alive as the mech you’re controlling shuts down. You do this by controlling a maintenance inside your mech – which, in turn, is controlled by an even smaller mech inside it.

I think it was fun. The general consensus of reviewers was that it got kind of repetitive after a while, which I can understand, but it was ultimately a culmination of a lot of work I’d been doing in the Love2D game engine.

Not gonna lie – I love this damn engine. It’s so minimal and forces you to kind of do things “the hard way” (implementing an entire game loop from basically scratch), but it was just so damn fun!

While experimenting with it, I did a lot of things along the way.

For example, I created a framework for a rouge-like detective game, with a character dialogue system, random map generation and a logic system (that allowed for backtracking).

A chess engine:

A minimalist visual novel engine (featuring its own scripting language):

(Which was generated by the script below):

A Batman fighter game, complete with a simple cutscene system:

And, finally, a raycasting demo:

Am I saying I’m the greatest game dev of our generation?

Yes, absolutely.

Joking aside, I do want to get back to this. My core issue with Love2D is the game distribution itself – I’d love to be able to embed it into web browsers, but the love.js package which is supposed to do just that doesn’t seem to work for me! I might have to switch to something else that gives me the same kind of core development loop (Raylib, mayhaps)?

At the end of August that I also attended a writing workshop up in the Croatian mountains. It was a lot of fun. The workshop I attended had us writing poetry, short stories, blogs(!), a drama piece and non-narrative texts. From a writing standpoint, the main challenge was writing in Croatian – I hadn’t done it in ages – but the feedback of others was really encouraging. Writing poetry was weird but people seemed to enjoy it (even if some of the pieces got fairly abstract, I suppose).

I’d still really like to give publishing something in Croatian a shot. The main challenge there, I feel, is that I feel inclined to write something non-mystery-ish in Croatian, simply because of my tendency to write mysteries in a very… genre-aware way that’s more fitting for people who’re into that sort of thing than general audiences. On the other hand, though, writing mysteries is the thing I enjoy the most, so kinda conflicted there. I’ll keep tooling away at it, though.

The main thing I enjoyed far more than the writing itself were the people! It was really fun to see the things the other members of my group brought to the table. There’s so much personal experience there and so much different ways of thinking – both in terms of approach and love of genres – that it was really inspiring to just be a part of that crowd!

Finally, in September, I submitted my first entry in the Interactive Fiction Competition called 198BREW: The Age of Orpheus. It’s the first time I’d ever used the Inform 7 engine – and first time I ever made an old-fashioned parser-based game!

…Unfortunately, I feel like it might also be the last? While the process was interesting, I’m not sure I really enjoyed it in the long run, and I feel like the game suffered because I didn’t gel enough with the engine. A lot of the things I ended up implementing felt like workarounds, and the final product – as noted by people who played the entry – felt incomplete from an interactivity standpoint.

But I’m proud that I finally entered the IF Comp after wanting to for a long while. And I’m happy that a lot of the people who played complemented the core writing.

I’ll admit the months after were a little slow from an output standpoint. I started hanging out with people more and a lot of my time was being too tired to do anything after work or just hanging out with people. So it goes! But I think it was time well-spent.

As I write this, with a slight cough after getting caught in the rain, I am reminded of the things that got me to write this entry in the first place.

For one, I started reading mystery fiction again. I’ve read some more of Tomoyuki Shirai and I’ll probably write a post summarizing my thoughts on the works I read. (Immediately saying, though: Elephant Head is a masterpiece!)

Secondly, I’ve been in an exceptionally good mood lately. I’ve actually gotten a little addicted to gift-giving which, if I’m trying to psychoanalyze myself, probably means I’m trying to share some of my own happiness to an extent.

Thirdly, one of my co-workers today stopped me to say he read Gospel of V and said he really liked it. I don’t think it really showed on my face, but it made me really happy to hear! It also reminded me that yes – I should probably get back to writing some more.

Finally, one of the leads at that workshop from September texted me today and asked “so, what’s up? seen you haven’t updated your blog”. So I figured I might as well.

Post-finally, I’ve also completed and nearing release of a small mystery VN that I’ll be posting about here shortly. So, stay tuned for that!

P. S.: I am no longer on Twitter. For all my social media ramblings/shitposting/short-term updates, you can find me on BlueSky.