PERSONAL

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Dreamons, Insomnia, Nostalgia

4 weeks ago2,078 words

Some venting about recent sleep issues - likely a result of persistent life situation issues - and thoughts about my current game dev project, Dreamons, some old GBC Legend of Zelda games, and the Netflix adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I've been struggling to motivate myself to write these blog posts recently.

Partly it's due to growing embarrassment about my wearyingly stagnant life situation, and concerns that people will just get annoyed at me for not magically transforming into someone less broken.

It's also due to the insomnia I've been dealing with for a while. I feel like I'm half conscious all night, or I'll wake up at like 2 or 3am and just lie there for an hour, unable to drift back off, or I'll wake up an hour or two earlier than I intend to and, again, can't drift off again. I use a sleep monitor app to check how many hours I get, and it's often about 5 a night. We need about 8, and I sleep and intend to wake at times that'd give me that, but my body doesn't cooperate.

Then of course I end up feeling crap during the day due to inadequate sleep.

I suspect it's largely due to general life stresses, not knowing what I'm doing with my time and my life. Feeling so far behind, trying to just accept that I'll never have certain things (most importantly, a young relationship that blossoms into figuring out real world responsibilities together), but not knowing where to start to get out of the pit I'm currently in. The usual.

Earlier this week, I wrote a list of all the things I'd need to do to get to a point where I felt independent. Breaking down the mountain into manageable chunks, ostensibly. It was a long, long list. And all of the things seemed interconnected, with no obvious easier one to start with. I just ended up getting caught up in choice paralysis and doing nothing. Or avoidance habits, thinking "this is stressful, I'll deal with it tomorrow", then tomorrow never comes.

And because I'm not being forced to do any of these things by, say, pushy, openly disappointed parents or the need to pay bills on time, it's so hard to find the motivation to do them even though I know I'd be better off in the long run for doing so.

I suppose just going for daily walks might be a good first step, just to get used to being out of the house. It's getting warmer now, so it'd be a good time for it. It just feels so dull wandering around the same areas alone, though... I listen to audiobooks, but still.



I've felt for much of my creative life that it'd be much easier if I just did one thing. Like if I was a 'musician', then I'd be able to focus entirely on music, join music communities, finish compositions quickly and release them frequently. I could work on my skills every day. Or if I were a 'programmer', or a 'writer', or an 'artist' (also, I find it odd that term tends to refer to both 'anyone who creates' and 'person who draws or paints visual art'), my path would be clearer.

Instead, I'm a jack of all trades but master of none. If I were to focus on music composition, I'd have to give up all the rest. And COULD I do that? I'd probably just be dragged back by the urge to indulge my other skills, as I was after brain cancer threw me off the psychology path.

I did google something like "going to school in my mid 30s for music composition", earlier in the week. Most of what I saw said it was a bad idea, that composer jobs were few and far between, or poorly-paid, and most people just went on to become music teachers or academics and composed in their free time. And it sounded like all composers-to-be were already more competent performers than I've ever been. Stuff I already kind of knew, which has put me off that path in the past despite it being the creative skill I get the most out of.

But it could be a great chance to meet people, at least!! Except music composition is more male-dominated than computer science, for whatever reason, and I have a ton of hangups about connections with other men due to past traumatic experiences. It's why I was only really able to find meaningful friendships with women on the female-dominated Psychology course.

But I should just get over that! Yeah, alright. I'll just flip the switch. It's that easy. While I'm at it, I'll turn off the social anxiety switch. Why did I ever have that on in the first place? What a fool I am to have made that choice.

(I don't hate men, to be clear. It's more like... the conversations I have with the female friends I made at uni are all about sharing worries, vulnerabilities, weakness, and reassuring one another, there's zero conflict, but I suppose many or most of my interactions with males in the past have been more like 'debates', arguments, conflict, everything I say being contested or picked apart, which I find exhausting. Or the thought of expressing positive sentiments feels like it'd be received with discomfort or anger. Cognitive distortions born of trauma.)



Anyway, making games is the one thing that worked out for me in the past - MARDEK etc - and I've spent most of my adult life identifying myself as a 'games developer', so that's what I try to focus my time on when I want to feel like I'm doing something other than wasting it.

I don't even know if that's what people want from me anymore, though. I know I'm unreliable. It takes a damn long time to finish a game, and I've started way more than I've ever completed (though from what I've seen, this seems to be the norm with (especially solo hobbyist) game devs).

I desperately wanted to finish Atonal Dreams, and spent two or three years on that. But it didn't work out. I still don't consider it abandoned, but my attention's been elsewhere for ages and I know it'll be difficult to get back into it. I'm also aware of the amount of work I have to do to complete it.

Dreamons started as a side project to get away from the burnout from that, or maybe more like a couple of side projects, which I combined, shifted around, changed the fundamental idea and title several times...

I'm happy with what I have now for the most part, and it's almost as far along as Atonal Dreams. It'd also require far less work to finish, because I've been focusing a lot during development on minimising asset requirements.

I've never really focused on it to the degree I did with past game projects, though, so it's not as far along as it could be. Maybe if I focus on it for a while, I'll finish (relatively) quickly.

Or so I've been thinking recently. Or maybe I just got back into it for the sake of having something to focus on that'd help me feel competent(ish) while avoiding the many, many life challenges I should really be facing instead.

I need to finalise a story for it. I've got the gist, but I need to decide on specific events and overarching themes. Once that's sorted, I feel the rest will fall into place fairly easily. Like how it's much easier to make an adaptation of a pre-existing story than something entirely original.

I wrote more about all that in a couple of posts on ∞ my Patreon ∞.

I also want to get back into the habit of writing about games dev in posts here, but wanted to get all this out and didn't want to make a combined post.

(Hmm, maybe I should do a game dev one on the weekend and a personal one mid-week or something??)



So I've been doing work on that, as much as I'm able, but much of the time I can't do much of anything due to the effects of the insomnia, or sudden panics about how I really should sort my life out and how the future looks bleak that don't really lead to anything other than days-long bouts of anxiety.

(Though it's annoyingly variable; some days I'll be lucky to do an hour of work, other days I'll be able to focus for like 7 somehow.)

I've also been trying to play games, watch things, in the hope that'll help somehow.



I replayed the Game Boy Color Zelda Oracle games (Ages/Seasons), which were essentially sequels to Link's Awakening that used the same mechanics and most of the same assets. I first played them on my actual physical Game Boy Color (or GBA?) as a teen when I lived in Australia, and thought I'd replayed them on emulators since then, but they weren't very familiar to me so maybe not? Or maybe I did but it's been many years.

Either way, when Link's Awakening was 'recently' remade in 3D, I thought these would get a remake too, but it's been 5 years since that (God, time flies...) with no sign of them so maybe not. A shame. Probably wouldn't have taken that long to make considering how much they could have reused, though maybe that's why they didn't bother trying? (But then again Game of the Year Tears of the Kingdom reused about as many assets and that didn't bother anyone...)

The reason I replayed these is because the way their overworld maps work was a big inspiration for my own game dev efforts. They're made of a grid of screen-sized 'rooms', which you transition between by moving to the edges.

It still amazes me how these vast-feeling worlds can be made up of so few pixels and kilobytes, and the level of immersion isn't all that different to what hyper-realistic games can evoke.

Or maybe I only believe that because I'm old and grew up with these? Explored them with childhood wonder that's long since faded...



I also watched the Netflix live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I only saw the original animated series recently - maybe a year or two or three ago, but then again I thought the Link's Awakening remake was 'maybe last year' - and I've never seen the much-derided Shyamalan film.

Because I saw the animated series as a jaded adult, I didn't have much of an emotional attachment to it. I enjoyed it well enough when watching an episode a day while eating meals, but largely forgot about it when it was over. I didn't remember a lot of the stuff in this adaptation, but recognised it was largely faithful to the original, especially in terms of things like character designs (visually, at least). I enjoyed it; some bits even moved me quite a bit.

But I suspected fans would have taken issues with it in some way or another. So I looked up fan community reactions, and that's exactly what I found. Complaints, criticism, disappointment.

I often think about whether to return to MARDEK, either as a faithful adaptation or a sequel. But I know there's nothing I could do with it that wouldn't receive old fans' ire, because what we become attached to is the feelings we had back then, which are impossible to replicate through new things we encounter with years behind us.

I enjoyed playing through those old Zelda games, but much of the appeal came from specific feelings or memories that this place or that scene reignited within me. I doubt I'd have felt the same had I never played them before.

Taming Dreams was my attempt to redo MARDEK anyway. Then Divine Dreams. Then Atonal Dreams (sort of). I suppose that's another reason Dreamons has been more appealing to me recently, as it's more its own thing. Doesn't have the same baggage or expectations to likely fail to meet.



Anyway, yes. Just rambling to get some thoughts out. I know there are life changes I need to make, but thinking about those for the past three months has less to a lot of stress and no progress, so I just want to focus on games dev again for a while.