The second half of last year and the beginning of this year hit me very hard. Not physically, but mentally. In the midst of it, I suffered a creative and motivational drought that persisted for many months.
At first I tried to fight it. I tried my hardest to force myself to make progress. But the productivity was crap. I could not focus worth anything when the country I was living in was literally being pulled apart at the seams in the midst of its worst crisis in over a century.
I finally realized that I was doing myself more harm than good trying to push through. Pushing through served me well for the first few months of the pandemic, but it displayed its limits clearly. I took a break, for a few months.
There were points when I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to start work again. Mentally, I think it was the lowest I’d ever been brought in my life. In February, I slowly started working again, just seeing if I could do a little bit more each session without getting disgusted and demotivated again. At that point I felt like I was running on half of my cylinders. But half was better than none, I supposed.
Then, I finally became eligible for the vaccine, and managed to get an appointment. Suddenly it was like the power came back on after a blackout. I could feel a lot of my old motivation returning, even before I went for my shot. Most days lately, I am feeling better than I did the day before.
At some point, I’m going to have to do something to work on my shattered faith in humanity, another casualty of 2020. Sooner still, I’m going to have to re-socialize myself after having gone near-feral the past year. But for now, know that I am back to work on Dehoarder 2 and all other things Smiling Cat.
What’s In Store for 2021?
Of course, I will be continuing to build the flagship Dehoarder 2. I continue to make architectural improvements to the game engine as I also work on scripting out events and object behaviors. My latest work is with the dart board puzzle/minigame, which when completed will drop a key item for progression.
In addition to Dehoarder 2, I will also be working in the immediate future on a quick refresh of all of my mobile titles on Android. Specifically, the following changes are definitely planned:
- Update to latest Unity and Android SDK and produce 64-bit builds. This should fix any warnings regarding old and crusty 32-bit apps.
- Remove ads from Prepare for Warp and Breaking Block.
- Remove in-app purchases from Prepare for Warp and Breaking Block.
- Vintage Pachinko will receive 2 new “lost” Deus Penguin levels.
There are a couple of other beneficial changes I would like to get to if time allows, such as cloud saves, but I will not commit to delivering that at this time. I want to keep the effort on this refresh small so as to not detract too much from Dehoarder 2 progress. I am but one person, after all, and can only take on so much.
Based on this plan, I will be disabling in-app purchases in the near future for Prepare for Warp and Breaking Block. I actually haven’t sold any of these in quite some time, and honestly, I never felt great about IAP in the first place. It’s one of the things that drove me away from mobile back to PC game development.
Vintage Pachinko will remain at the same 99 cent price as always. I really much prefer the “pay for a game, get a game” business model, and Vintage Pachinko still faithfully sells a handful of copies every month, even now nearly 8 years after its initial release.
I’m still in the process of winding down my Kongregate presence. In fact, I am ready to turn off the lights at any time. The only thing that keeps me from doing so is that I am trying to wait until the good folks at Flashpoint can come along and properly archive my games within their collection, for which I have given explicit permission. In fact, two of my seven Unity Web Player games, Werepenguin’s Escape and Thrust or Bust, are already preserved in the Flashpoint 9.0 collection! I am humbled to be a small but documented part of gaming history.
Hopefully I will be posting again soon with some updated screenshots of Dehoarder 2. Until then, take care of yourself, and make sure you get your shot when you are eligible, so that we can all get back to some semblance of normalcy.