2016 was a really good nerd year (turning 42 had to mean something, right!?) and I got a lot of work done (while also working on my meta-game), but not much else, and come february this year I felt over-worked, so it was time for a break before it got worse (hello one of the reasons one-man indie-teams might fail):

• restoring a proper eat/sleep cycle,
• getting out more,

• relaxing with a piece of music: I thought I’d put it up for sale and see what happens, but the post-production/mixing is still lacking, so, even if the music itself isn’t too bad (after having listened to it a thousand times, I kind of lost track), I can’t expect anyone to want to pay for it. No strong emotions were dealt during first performance (no tomatoes nor anything else were thrown), which I guess means it was kind of boring.

  Oh well, at least I had fun making it and I also got to try a couple of new techniques and learn a bit more about composition and music theory (as someone with no formal training nor any hardware except my laptop and a pair of headphones, sometimes I wonder why I’m making music in the first place. While the need to create cannot be ignored without consequence, there are things I’m a lot better at, so why music in particular?).

  Another thing is that maybe I should stick to the more abstract/weird pieces I’ve done before, because those are closer to my heart than the pieces like this one where I try to make things a little more accessible!?

The last two weeks I’ve been spring cleaning and right now I’m defrosting my freezer; while waiting for that to finish I got back to playing Linelight again and finally solved the puzzle I got stuck on last I played (a couple of days ago). I might write more about Linelight later, but in short it’s a pure puzzle game, requiring both cognitive skill and manual dexterity. The sort of perfect timing and precise movement that some puzzles require is a bit of a weakness of mine (the game recommends using a controller, but unfortunately I couldn’t get mine to co-operate, so I’m stuck with a keyboard, which might make it harder (excuses, excuses… :-p )), so sometimes I know the solution long before being able to execute it. If you like solving puzzles (and don’t mind getting stuck from time to time (I personally sort of breezed through the first five worlds in one sitting, but then on the sixth I started to get stuck and let it sit for a few days in-between)) and don’t need a story, Linelight is greatly recommended.

Anyway, once spring cleaning is done I plan on getting back to coding my game’s main feature and finish it (it’s the sort of thing I could sell as a separate module for other developers to use). Then I can also include it in my demo (parallel to coding I’m working on the demo landscape (the underlying shape of the landscape is mostly done and now it needs to be populated)). It’s not the easiest thing to get working well enough for real-time in-game use, though, so, even if I’ve already gotten pretty far, there is still a risk it won’t work out.