[Rewards] and by the way, what happened to DPTG (Patreon)

ugh, i've been procrastinating the second part of this post for a while. first the usual stuff

for all patrons pledging/increasing in april:

• credits list is updated, forum accounts are tied
• as usual if you've been missed or want to call in a higher tier reward hit me so far up fam
• i feel like there's usually more bullet points here but i can't remmeber what they are right now so that's all we get i guess

--

ok so it's kind of been an eternity since i posted about DPTG and you might notice that the tag has been dropped from the front of the patreon page. or you might not if you're a newer patron and instead you might wonder what the heck is DPTG. well, here:

DPTG is short for Don't Play This Game. It's an abstract 16bit psych horror game about depression and mental illness that i was working on on and off over the past couple years or so. i didn't talk about it outside of patreon sans one thing on the website because it was mostly just a personal project that maybe i would release if it got that far, and otherwise working on it was just a way to give shape to and deal with my own depression etc. i had planned to base the elements of the game on a cognitive behavioural therapy model and allow the player to work through horrors representative of mental illnesses in a game setting using techniques matching those that could be available for them in the real world as well. 

but it's been a while and so I owe an update:
basically, i had to drop the project. 

i really don't like doing that and it's something i would definitely consider revisiting in the future or picking back up, but not right now, especially since it was just a side deal for my mental health. but as far as why i'm dropping it, there are two main reasons:

the first is that i actually lost like half the files for it. 

those of you who were around last summer will remember that time when my computer died and i had to get it repaired, and in that time i had to reinstall windows, which wiped the hard drive. i had backed up almost everything before beginning that process, so i shouldn't have lost much. in fact at the time i posted about how i had only lost the music project files and a couple other ones for E17 (by the way? those couple files i had lost were amaria's redone VS sprites. i re-redid them and that's the ones you've seen in-game) because i forgot to back them up. 

and as for DPTG, there's an obvious conclusion. did i forget to back them up?
....actually, no.

so when i backed up all those files, i put them onto an external hard drive. it's one my father gave me, in fact, it was a pretty fancy one for the time, but bulky-- you have to like set it up and plug its own power supply in, etc...
the thing is, my father gave it to me ten years ago.
and he'd had it for a while before that.
basically it's from the year 2000. and it was good for the time!! stores 80 GB!! like wow, 80 GB in the year 2000! can you imagine? what a high end device! it really was!

unfortunately, i have since been violently notified that it is now 2018.

so like, i knew this device was old, and that 80 GB isn't that much anymore, but i've been using it for a long time and it's always held up, and i didn't really need more than that, so i thought it was fine.
it was not fine.

i think it was around this last october or so that i noticed a bunch of files from DPTG were missing, most notably the nightmares that had i spent sooo long spriting. i was like, okay, that's weird, but maybe i just didn't copy them over from the hard drive all right. so i looked on the hard drive from the summer's back up, but they weren't there either-- despite the fact that a couple of them were, and all the surrounding files seemed to be okay.
so that's weird.
i actually was able to recover a few of the missing graphics from what i've posted here previously. so that's nice. however, there was still like half of them missing. concerned and not knowing what else to do, i set it aside hoping i'd accidentally moved them or something and i'd run across them sooner or later

so in january i had a friend over-- that prospective animator we tried out, in fact. it didn't work out with her on the animation team, but she did me a service in checking out my files to see if they could still be recovered from the hard drive even if they had been deleted. some memory restoration jank... i learned some stuff.
anyway, we found where the files were, but couldn't recover them... because basically that part of the disk had become corrupt or something like that.
i was then lectured on how using a hard drive from the year 2000 was probably a stupid idea in the first place and i should not use it again.

lesson learned...
so even though i backed them up, the fucking back up disk deleted those things and they're toast. i would have to redo a lot of that work that i had done preemptively and had not shared.

in true "Don't Play This Game" fashion, perhaps I could say that the hard drive was simply doing the world a favor by removing such terrible content.
but i am still cross with it.

still, i could redo it all if i really wanted to, which brings us to the second reason:

i mentioned before that the game was largely based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which for the unfamiliar is a very popular and commonly accepted model of therapy that focuses on helping a client redirect their thoughts and behaviors to healthier ones the same as they would change any other habit. i am very familiar with using it in mental health settings, and practicing it myself, and i've greatly appreciated it in the past. 

so around the same time as i got my computer repaired-- end of summer, i started a new therapy program that i've continued since. this really isn't the lightest subject matter, but the specific program i'm in is a trauma-informed program specifically for survivors of sexual abuse. it's helped a lot! but one thing i've learned and experienced in it is that, for this kind of issue, CBT is really just... garbage.

like it's all well and effective in most scenarios or for the layperson, but as my previous therapist described to me, if these kinds of issues could be solved in cognition alone, nobody would actually be there. and indeed, while there's always a cognitive element to therapy, my experience and my therapists' experience have confirmed that it's just... not adequate to ignore the other half of it. 

so that's going really well for the most part, as far as i'm personally concerned
as far as DPTG is concerned, it has kind of upended the entire central framework for the game.

when i was on board with CBT before and effectively swore by it, i felt pretty good about publishing a game effectively featuring its techniques. and it's true that even now, that would probably still be helpful for a lot of people. but now, since it's distinctly not-helpful for me, it's difficult for me to feel good about pushing this into a game i'm making for myself knowing that it very much doesn't work for me anymore.

so that kind of leaves me like... although i could redo the work... what's the point anymore?
if it were either of these problems alone, probably i would just deal with it and keep chugging forward. but both together... i dunno. i feel pretty lost with the project right now.

so like i said, maybe i'll pick it back up one day, or pull a lot of elements back out of it for something else. but for now, i'm shelving it.

which sucks, but, whatever.
more time to focus on Reborn and Starlight. ^~^

thanks for sticking around for everything, i love you all~