Change of Plans (August 22 2025)

I've recovered from my sickness. No more vomiting or anything, and the headache basically subsided in a couple days. It took some more days for my appetite to return though, one day it took me several hours to eat all my breakfast. Fortunately I'm all good now.

After spending a bunch of time not making any progress on the platforming game, I think I just need to take a break from it. Not making progress on a game for over a month just killed my creativity and any motivation to resume working on it. Instead I'm going back to that other puzzle game, the one where you have to remember tiles and play minigames in between. Work on that game will go much faster, since all that's left to do are minigames, and the minigames shouldn't take much time.

But while working on some minigames, I realized my weakness. I don't enjoy handcrafting individual levels. I started a minigame where you must shoot your character across the screen and pick up moving coins, but I got so bored placing the coins that I didn't want to work on it. I straight up wasted 3 days not being able to finish even this really simple game.

This must also be why I lost interest in the platforming game, I've gotten bad at making levels. I think it's because it's a lot of work for low payoff. Each level must be carefully made by the designer, and then the player will blitz through it in a couple minutes or even seconds. This may also be why I enjoy Randomly Generated RPG and Relentless Waves. I don't have to make levels, just the things that can be randomly chosen each time you play.

I don't know how many minigames I'll make, but probably a lot. Definitely more than 10. My plan is to only spend 2 days on each minigame, which means this will be what I'm doing for the next few weeks or so.

Sickness (August 15 2025)

The family visiting is gone, which is a relief since they are really loud (especially at night). But on wednesday I got really sick. I feel like I get sick pretty rarely (since I've been doing these blog posts I know this is the first time I got sick in 2025), but when I do I tend to get hit pretty hard.

This time I didn't experience any sore throat or anything, but I did have a pretty bad headache. It's gotten better after some medication, but on wednesday and thursday it was hard to walk around, and I slept for a large portion of the day. And I was so low energy that I barely had the energy to chew food, and spent most of the day hungry.

This sickness was especially bad. I haven't vomited in years, and yet at one point it got so bad I vomited 3 times in 24 hours (and one of those times was at 4-5am). It's stopped now, but vomiting is very unpleasant for me.

With this, plus the family thing, basically no progress has been made. I think I've mostly recovered from this sickness, but I'm still not at full strength yet.

Family Visiting (August 08 2025)

Progress has once again slowed down because I have family visiting. Now the expected release date for the platformer is September. It feels bad to go this long without having released anything due to various factors, and also this game doesn't feel especially content-heavy (it'll be 6 short levels at most). Many things have happened in the summer that have made things much busier than before, and I feel like I've lost some of my creative energy because of it.

The secret online game has continued to take up time. I thought I'd get the chance to play it with my cousin in-person but they constantly have to leave the house with their dad for many hours at a time, which ruins that plan. I never go with them because it doesn't sound fun. Having to accompany 2 kids who I can't communicate with in any language also doesn't make me want to go along. I would just be spending 99% of the time on my phone, with no audio, and I'd rather than just do that at home with a computer instead.

I also never understood the point of going on vacation. It costs a lot of money (both for flights and getting a place to stay) and time (all the traveling), and all of that is just for 1-2 weeks of going somewhere and then probably never going back again. It just doesn't seem worth it to me. I don't really care about sightseeing or taking pictures, and most of time still seems to be on your phone (again you don't need to go outside to use your phone). I also never understood how people could get bored staying at home during covid; most people have computers/phones with wifi, finding things to do is easy.

There's still another week before the other family members leave. It's been less than a week and I'm already tired of their existence. Even small things like losing one of the bathrooms has been very disruptive. It makes me wish to never have long-term guests at this place ever again.