Home - Blog - 12/31/2024
End of Year General Update
I'm not an expert in chronology or anything, but it looks like today is the last day of 2024. Depending on your time zone, you may be living in 2025 already! I'm going to touch upon how things have been for me lately and go over next year's plans.
What's the Matter, Helispark?
There have been a lot of developments for me lately. Mostly bad things, weighing down on my mind, but I can go over most of them briefly. For starters, I broke up with my boyfriend, and for a while I've been feeling pretty scared for my future because of the United States presidential election results.
The worst thing that happened, though, is something I haven't discussed online at all until this point. I had a really, really awful experience in our college's game studio department this fall. All students were required to take a capstone course that was pretty elaborate - the idea was that we'd get on teams to make one game over the course of the semester, and at the end half of the teams' games would be greenlit and half would be cut. The teams would be reformed and the remaining games would get one more semester of work on them before they were finished.
My team was mostly alright, if not very neurotic. But our combat designer was a real piece of shit. He frequently worked an absurd amount of hours on the project each week, and used it to dictate the direction that the project would go in. Every day we met, he'd start arguments with someone, and I had to take the brunt of it since I had to work closely with him as the team's enemy designer. The team was an absolute mess by the halfway point, and I think that in most situations, he would have gotten what was coming to him, but he was close friends with our professor, so somebody else was going to take the fall for this. Because of my low processing speed, I had been working nonstop on the project to try to meet sprint goals, but it never seemed to be enough for my teammates. So I was removed from the team sometime in mid-October.
I didn't talk to most of my former teammates after that. It screwed up my plans for graduation, but thankfully not as severely as it could have, as because of my processing disorder which the college did not previously accommodate for, I've been specially admitted into an independent study program that will count for the requirements. I'm now set to graduate at the end of next summer.
Plans for Next Year
I'm talking about this on here because, to be honest, the experience has really damaged my motivation to make video games. I'm trying to find that spark again. But it may take some time. Luckily, there are a lot of things I can do with this degree. Indie development was always closer to my dream than working in a big studio was, so I think it will be easier to regain the motivation to do that.
You may be wondering what this means for Cruise Planet. Well, regardless of all this, that project has been looking gloomy for a while. I'm going to write a proper post on the game's itch.io page going over the situation sometime in the next few days, but since you've read up to this point, I'll tell you that I'm going to put it on indefinite hiatus.
When I do start making games again, which will be soon as I'll be returning to college in two weeks, I want to start small. That'll be my New Year's resolution. My general plan for game development for the future is to start with a small project, something I can complete in under a month's time, and finish it. The next time I make a game, I can make something a bit bigger, and bigger, until I am finally confident and skilled enough to properly be able to undertake a year-long project. If you look into the industry a bit more, you'll realize that this is a winning strategy. Many indie developers these days make their first game a three to five year long effort. Most of those games are cancelled before they ever ship, and the ones that do tend to be pretty bad and fail financially. The problem isn't that those games are bad or that they fail - that's a perfectly normal thing for your first project. The problem is that three to five years is an enormous undertaking for such inexperienced developers! All of that wasted time when the lessons could have been learned sooner with a smaller project. I wasn't really immune to this trap, as you've seen with Cruise, but I've seen the signs before the worst was yet to come.
Lastly I'll talk about web development. For a while, I had been putting off making pages for six of my most recent photography trips. I'm thinking of renaming that section of the website to "Photography" instead of "Birding", as I've branched out far beyond just taking pictures of birds. But today, you can now see the photos I took from three of those six trips! In order, they are:
I'll get to the other three soon, and I hope to better keep up with these things in the future. Starting with these pages, I've taken a new approach which is to halve the resolution of all the images before uploading them. The previous pages will also have their images reuploaded in half resolution as well. I have a lot of good reasons to do this - chiefly among them is that the loading of the full size images was awfully slow, and halving the resolution has reduced loading times at least tenfold. It's also going to tremendously cut down on how much data I'm using of Neocities' free 1 gigabyte of storage space, though I do plan to become a supporter someday just because this site is awesome. I don't think that the resolution change will affect many of this site's viewers, but if anybody wants the full resolution version of something, they're free to find me on my Discord and ask for them.
That's everything I wanted to cover! Here's to 2025. I know a lot of people are worried, but I hope that we will all get through it together. And hope's an important thing.