Articles and other shit i've written

Recently I've been on a nostalgic organization kick. I've had a lot of unsorted, unorganized data just lying around for years on my hard drives, mass collections of every file and folder that I thought might be important or meaningful, copied right before one of many factory resets from the past decade into an ever growing pile of trash. And maybe it's the cost of storage rising, the SMART reports from my SSDs growing bleaker, or maybe 24 is just the start of that age where you just stare at everything you did in the past and get weird fuzzies about it, but I've decided to sift through it all, deleting what's worthless and organizing what's worth...ful. And I came across a gem.

Hey, welcome back! It's been three months since Brian and I quit our jobs and threw everything into making a video game, Stardust Frontier. Last we left off, Brian and I were just preparing to go to our first GDC together, hoping it would give us some more insight on the professional game development space. And insight it delivered. It's crazy how you can just walk up to any random person in a space like that, and they'll all have something interesting and unique to talk about. By the end of our four days there, we had more than two dozen cards of cool folks we met to take home with us, and those were just the ones we ended up keeping! We also had an opportunity to reconnect with many of the people we'd met at PAX last September, which we were both super grateful for.

So, it's been just over a month since I quit my job, uprooted my life, and threw everything into starting an indie game studio. How's that been going?

Last year in September, my close friend Brian and I had the opportunity to go to PAX, and through a series of increasingly absurd coincidences, ended up meeting and making friends with a whole host of industry professionals, one of which ended up investing in us and our idea! That idea is Stardust Frontier, a rogue-like team-based party game played with two to eight players. The players are split into two teams, each team controlling a giant mech, and they both get sent to the same rim-world to fight over an exceedingly valuable piece of space-junk. Players contribute to the team's progress by playing micro-games on their phones, in some sort of unholy fusion of Jackbox and WarioWare.

Tonight, I found myself cycling home from Director Holden's in the dark, taking a route I hadn't ridden in a very long time. The sky was clear and the air was crisp, and there was nobody around besides myself, quietly cycling down the Galloping Goose. I had already resolved to travel home the long way, taking the scenic route that I hadn't followed since getting tired of my work commute last Autumn, and atop that, it was my first bike ride of any substantial distance since at least before Christmas.

I've spent 8 years of my life building websites, but for the past 4 I haven't had one of my own. Why did this happen? When I began learning web development back in high-school, the first project I undertook was to build myself a personal website. What else would I do? I was messing around, I was excited to finally have a space to call my own whose design wasn't dictated by the constraints of Social Media or a block-based builder like Weebly. For a while, that was basically all I did, at one point I had four completely separate and disconnected personal websites, just because I liked the art of making them. And eventually, I ended up getting pretty alright at web development, and I decided to dip my hand into freelancing.

My journey with web development has been … nontraditional. I'm a big proponent of self-taught programming, and for me, that usually takes the form of deciding I want to create something, and then figuring out how to make it work as I go along. That's how I'm building this new site now, using NextJS for the very first time (in 2024, haha), and that's how I built my first website as well, way back in 2016. And while I'll always support the self-taught mentality, it can sometimes cause you to make some… odd decisions.

I was born in 2001, and ever since I've been surrounded by technology. I learned to use a computer when I was 6. I've never known what it's like to not have that sort of tech in my life. It all feels so normal, but when I hear stories from my parents about their lives when they were younger, I find myself faced with the stark difference between their childhoods and mine, and just how much society has changed since then.

I spend upwards of 8 hours with my friends every day, usually entirely virtually. If I'm awake, it's a pretty good bet that I'm talking to someone or another. It's honestly more uncommon for me to be on my own than for me to be online with one of my friends, and that's really interesting to me.

I've been making a game for the past few weeks, and the experience is amazing.

I'm no stranger to making games, of course. I've posted about my other work basically everywhere except here. But I don't think I've enjoyed it this much since I made my first project in Gamemaker 8. Since then it feels like it's been a downward spiral. Every project I did felt less satisfying than the one before, resulting in me getting burnt out quicker and quicker. Since Gamemaker, I've shifted from one development I didn't like to the next, never finding something that felt right.