Hey.
First of all, I'm really sorry about the low output lately. Turns out trying to hit multiple birds with a single stone is pretty difficult. Yet I keep doing it because of FOMO. I don't know what else to do honestly. Thankfully one of the IRL things I was doing has mostly come to an end and I can start doing more work on more of the Vishport stuff.
New Video: Warm Morning
This month I released a new music video thing with the name "Warm Morning," because it's getting warm or whatever. I think this is the quickest I've written a song and shipped it out. Probably in the course of 4-5 days. It's kind of nice to see that my ability of dishing out songs on a short time frame is improving. Same with last month as well.
Unfortunately work has been slow on the "special" videos I talked about in earlier posts that are supposed to gather preexisting audiences. These are essentially recreation attempts of a few songs that I like but I haven't quite figured out how to recreate a lot of the instruments used in them. So instead of full recreations, I'll probably try to make covers of the songs instead since putting my own spin on it would be far easier.
More Musings
I can't help but have a few negative feelings about the situation at hand. There's real life that I want to take care of and move forward with, and then there's this. Both require me creating, maintaining projects and devoting time to them but the silver lining is that the "real life" projects are much more passive and the nature of the work is not the same, so I'm not just repeating what I do here on Visphort.
It's not really easy on me to see other people seemingly move ahead of me in life and working on themselves as I try to juggle this and things that would help me pull a better salary. I feel like I'm working on both aspects without being able to provide a full commitment to either, and so in my eyes the end results of both seem to fall short of what could have realistically been done had I given them my entire effort. If this keeps on being the trend I'm not sure if I'll succeed in either line of work. This whole situation feels like a big case of wanting to have cake and eat it too, but I'm really at a loss as to what to do here.
One of the big factors that don't help with this situation is me slacking off, procrastinating and in general just wasting my time. Of course, you can get only so much work done in a day after you tire out, but having multiple distractions at hand (like computers and phones) along with my focus being very fragile is definitely not allowing me to utilize 100% of my daily mental capacity. This problem has definitely seen improvement since I've started Visphort (hell, I started Visphort in part to make me accountable to myself and catch me if I start slacking off,) but it's clearly not enough. Maybe I should try those digital detox things to get rid of this.
This wouldn't be as big of a problem if I wanted Visphort to be nothing more than just a hobby, a dumb thing I do every now and then to just satisfy myself. Beating around the bush on this topic would just be dishonest to myself. At the very least, I want people to see what I do and tell me how it is, whether it's good or bad. I just want people to see it. Do I want to make money off of this someday? Sure, but I want people to notice me first and foremost. Be someone who is worth knowing about. From what little I've seen, I've noticed that I work harder if there are people watching over me and they expect things from me. Visphort has been a very good way of making myself work solely through my willpower, but there's room for improvement.
Another factor is that I basically have no one but myself to do and discuss all of this. People that I know are not really invested as much as me in tech stuff, if at all. For some reason I have never really gone out of my way to find communities online either and my conversations don't go beyond superficial communication. I've talked about this before on previous posts and this is something I really do want to improve on, but there hasn't been much of a change in this area.
For now, I've decided to do the following: I have an IRL target that is time bound and this is the prime time to do it. I'll be focusing on that, and in addition to that I'll try to put my maximum effort into the "secret game" that I am making. Of course, I'll be making and uploading songs to Youtube on the side (the game needs it anyway so it's good practice.) I've put a deadline on the game's demo somewhere during October to November this year, as I've probably said before.
Whew, that's a lot off my chest.
Future Plans
This month I'll be entering another game jam. A month-long one this time. I plan to make something that's very easy to maintain so there isn't a repeat of what happened with Stretcherdrill where instead of the game itself I worked more on polishing everything that surrounded it. If it's possible, I want to make the game in such a way that I'm able to make some content out of it for Youtube. I don't really plan on spending the entire month on making the game as I have other stuff to do.
From now on, I want to really focus on the "secret game" that I've been talking about. Really ramp up the production on it and also keep my real life goals to a minimum for some time. I plan to release a demo somewhere during the end of this year.