Wandering thoughts of a tired dev (skip this if you don't care) (Patreon)

This has been an evening of deep, introspective reflections... I guess that's what working while listening to Evanescence and Lacuna Coil does to a MFer.

This post is going to be mostly for me, to just write my thoughts down and let them go out into the ether, feel free to skip this if you follow this page only for updates.

One year ago I was miserable, the five steps I had to take every morning to go from the bed to the PC for my remote work always felt like kilometers.

10 years in the service industry took away the simple pleasure of being around people, covid took away all my hard earned savings, working in the corporate world was taking away my soul.

I'm aware that I sound like a whiny bitch saying this. The pay was fine, the hours manageable and I worked in my PJs with my cat on my lap, and yet I never felt more sad and hopeless. Like, that was going to be my ceiling, all that I could ever hope to achieve, be a decent CS for an eastern tech company.

As a teen I used to dream of becoming a cartoonist. I used to earn the money to fuel my Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! addictions by drawing yaoi commissions and my highschool lit teacher would beg me to write SOMETHING, ANYTHING, 'cause she loved the way I wrote, despite my poor grammar (yes, I'm bad at grammar in TWO languages). But that never amounted to anything.

In my twenties, despite hating having to deal with rude customers and having to keep my short temper in check, I kinda enjoyed being a bartender. I was all in on being the stereotypical bartender that listens to your babble while pretending to clean a glass (we got dishwashers behind the counter, we don't need to clean anything by hand). But covid killed a lot of small bars and pubs around me, so I was out of a job.

Finally, in my early thirties, I was a drone answering tickets and rejecting refunds 'cause the customer didn't check a specific, almost hidden, checkbox on a form during the day and playing Cyberpunk at night, never leaving my computer chair.

Then, I got fired.

I've talked about how I started making Actual Roommates in the 6 months celebration post, so I won't go back into that and just fast forward to today.

I woke up late 'cause my phone died during the night, I drank the shittiest coffe my coffee machine ever made, plonked my ass on my chair, opened DAZ and started working. One more coffee break during the day, 30 minutes to re-heat and have dinner, then back on the chair.

At 11 PM my parents called me to politely ask to stop singing so damn loud 'cause they could hear me from upstairs and I took it as a sign that it wass time for bed.

I'm sitting here, exhausted. I've written 3 scenes, posed 60 renders for two different games and a couple promotional ones for a friend. I can barely keep my eyes opened, a pounding headache is screaming at me to just turn off the lights and rest.

And I've never felt happier.

Yes, I make less money that I made working CS.

Yes, every end of the month I'm counting every cent to see if I can spare anything to give to my parents to help them out.

Yes, it's nerve-wrecking knowing that I'm one bad update away to have everything crumbling down.

But I've never felt more alive than in these past few months.

Actual Roommates will end and I will have this thing that I can show and say "Yes, I made this! I finished this!" and be a badge of honour. Neon Heart will continue to be the thing I make for me, no matter how many months it'll take between being able to update it. Actual Roommates 2 will take everything I've learned so far and improve on it, all while finally giving me the chance to put to use my stupid love for idiotic early '00s American comedies.

And yes, not everyone will like AR, AR2 won't be everyone's cup of tea (even less people will like Neon Heart considering the shit I'm pulling in the next update), and I will keep getting irrationally fuck-ass mad when I see my games being snubbed for others I personally don't like, 'cause taste is subjective but I've got an ego the size of a house.

I don't care, I'm happy!I love when for some reason textures in DAZ have some sort of bleed due to compression errors and I have to ask other devs how to fix it.

I love that I can put a poll on discord and 100% of participants say that "Yes, Rikako needs to be spanked".

I love getting several 1-star reviews in the span of an hour from accounts less than a day old.

I love panicking 'cause I didn't save a scene after posing it and now I have to remake it from scratch.

I love the hair texture bug that makes DAZ crash when you turn on the Iray preview if you don't turn off a specific setting.

I love that half the shit I need for scenes just doesn't exist and 99% of the times the solution is "use cum but change the colour".

I love getting ideas while I'm cooking dinner and having to run to my desk to write them down before I forget them.

I love when other dev put cameos or references of my game in theirs when theirs is so much fucking better than mine and I don't even remotely deserve the honour.

I love when people reach out to tell me how much they enjoyed the game.

I love the people that subscribe to the commission tier and ask for hardcore BDSM and I panic 'cause I got not fucking idea what that even looks like.

I love the people that subscribe to the commission tier and don't want a commission.

I love the one guy that bought the game on itch for 10€ and, one hour later, came back to buy it AGAIN for 5 more €.

I love Ray, Asia, Fire, Devian, Insomni, Xoullion and even that annoying little asshole named Winterfire.

I love that in my head me, Flip, IM6 and Shelly are these 4 Horsepeople of the Lesbian Apocalypse that is coming to lesbify all your VNs.

I love you all, I love making this game(s).

Fuck me, I'm happy! And I'm writing this down for whenever making games will make me feel sad, annoyed, angry or just bored in the future.

Remember how depressed and hopeless you were, HanakoX, and remember that now you have dreams.

Remember how directionless you felt, and remember that now you have motivation and drive.

Remember how frustrated you were, and remember how frustrated you are now, but for happier and more creative reasons... and mostly towards DAZ being an annoying piece of software.

I'm sorry if you read through all of this, it's something I needed to get out of my brain.