did you grow up with friends?

i did, but never in a constant way. the last few days, i spent some time with someone i've always had a pretty rocky relationship with, and we spoke a lot about growing up, getting hurt, and what love means. we've both been hurt a lot by people we've loved.

my first memories were in Chicago. i was playing on the carpeted floor of my grandma's house, pushing along some toy cars as she cooked in the kitchen. i knew some kids in church, but no one i was close too, and definitely no playdates.

then we moved.

i was a tiny bit older, and i was painting alone in the kitchen floor. i remember how cold and wet the paint was, and how i slapped it onto paper bigger than i was with my bare hands. how yellow and blue made green.
time passed, older yet still so small, in the backyard, watching my two older sisters run while i sat on the stone, my new dad's dog playing with them but too big and too rough to play with me.

then we moved.

in Florida, i went to the vending machine with my first friend. we saw each other every day, living in the same condo complex and playing in the same community pool. i got a grape soda and he got orange. when i opened the soda and took a drink, he smacked the bottom of the can as hard as he could, and i bit my lip, dropped the can, and cried.

then we moved.

two boys that went to school with me invited me outside to play. i liked them a lot, because we all played video games together, but i knew for some reason my mom had told me not to play with them. they were "weird". but i said yes, because my mom didn't pay much attention to my comings and goings. this must have been 2005 or so.
when i got back, she yelled at me, of course, and made it very clear if i ever played with them again i'd be in Huge trouble. so i didn't.

so i made two new friends. taylor and cassie. it was hard to make friends, because i could only be friends if it means they never asked to come over and play at our house. we had too many kids, with all 6 kids living there.
cassie was a girl. her mom and dad were getting divorced, so i didn't see her dad much, but he always played super monkey ball with us.
taylor was a boy. i was able to walk to his house from mine, and we played on his trampoline and in his pool. his parents were so nice to me.
i thought they would be my best friends forever.

then we moved.

i went to springfield with my dad and siblings. we sang 100 bottles of beer on the wall and got all the way to 0.
when my mom got there, she told me with an amused tone that taylor had ran all the way to our house the day we left. our car had just taken off. he ran there and asked if he was too late to say goodbye, and he was crying, she said.
he was too late. i cried after she told me.
but i was going to get over it. i made two new friends, again. sean and mackenzie.
mackenzie was a girl. her parents were really rich, and she was super pretty, but she liked to play outside with me and make swords and watch naruto.
sean was a boy. his parents owned the farm fields that cut off our cul-de-sac from the rest of the world. one time his dad screamed at me, saying, "why are you always on our property? i work all day, i don't need more kids over here". i went home crying and spent the rest of the week playing in the forest in the back of the house.
they lived nearby, so it was easy to be their friend, but my best friend was Ruth.
Ruth was the most amazing girl in my class. at the end of the year, the teacher told us to tell the class how we think we'll be remembered. she said, "As the smarty-pants, know-it-all, bossy girl". it was really funny and we all laughed, because that was basically the truth. everyone called her that. i didn't, but she was laughing, so i laughed, too. one time, she wrote a story, and i drew pictures to go along with it. we stapled it together and read it during recess. we played pretend a lot, making intricate storylines that would span entire school weeks. i was so excited for the next year to see if we would be classmates again.

then we moved.

my mom always said, "that move broke you". it probably did.
i didn't have any friends in fifth grade. there was a boy in my class who i had a crush on, and we played runescape together, but that was it.
i went to a sleepover via an invitation from a girl who i wasn't too close to. we went to church together. the only thing i really remember from that was when the girls were talking, and one girl said to the birthday girl, "i knew you shouldn't have invited her" in response to me being weird and shy. i cried behind the couch. at 6am, the moment her parents woke up, i asked to go home.
i was bullied. i got my period when i was 10, so my body was changing a lot sooner than all my peers. i got acne, glasses, needed to start wearing bras. i hated my body so much i would wear 10 layers at any given point. i was nerdy, drawing my OCs and little comics in lieu of taking notes, and the new community of Majority White Neoliberal Suburbia wasn't as accepting of differences as my last home of Rural Midwest Emo Kids. god, those kids hated me. when i told my mom about the bullying, she laughed.

6th grade to graduation is its own can of worms. but from then on, my strategy was to find One friend. one person i could cling to. at first, it was a girl named C. then a boy named M. then a man 10 years older than me named S and his friend T... etc. something they all have in common is they also doubled as a romantic partner. someone to fulfill every need i had. i was terrified, constantly. desperate for love and wanting it so badly i did anything for it.

i was scared of just being friends.

to this day, i think i'm scared of friends. i'm scared of the internal bargaining, the idea that there's going to be preferences and rankings and i will never clear even top 10. like it's MySpace, and if it came down to it, i'm the least favored friend and i just don't make the cut.

hanging out with this friend this weekend helped with that. if it came down to it, i don't know if i would clear his top 5 friends. probably not his top ten, either.
but i had fun. i liked hearing his stories. i liked asking him things, learning more about him. i made a comment to him late one night about how i'm, essentially, the "family loser" compared to my siblings. he looked at me very earnestly and said, "you're not a loser, theo".
it makes me cry now typing it out. at the time i laughed it off, but, it really meant a lot to hear. from someone i'm not super close to, but would like to be closer to. from someone who has hurt me a lot, but god knows i've hurt, too.

i'm learning to be okay with the idea that i may end up alone. that one day, my daughter will be grown and it'll just be me. no romantic partner, no person to spend my days with. i feel like i need to be okay with this idea before i date again.

i'm hoping... if i'm okay being alone, i can make better friendships. i can be a better friend. i can be a better person. i can make friendships, learn about others, be there for them, and not due it because i'm scared. but because it's fun. because it makes my life more enriched for having done it.

i don't think it's possible for me to not "rank" friendships. to not see myself as a number on someone's list. but i think if i can get over that number not being nearly as important as my brain would want me to think it is, then i'll be okay.

this is much ado about nothing, i guess.

... writing summer is hard. i'm not really drawing on personal experience. i'm guessing. giving a vague approximation of what i think being able to have a best friend all your life is like. weaving out a fantasy where no one was hurt. where everyone could grow up and look upon their childhood happily. for me, i remember the loneliness more than anything else. the all-consuming grief of losing my friends sticks with me. the constant pain that was meeting new people, that was seeing myself from their eyes and realizing i was merely tolerated at best. i wish i could see myself as more than just a loser.

I think I'm definitely getting back into the groove of things since my last real update back in late May. I took most of June off besides talking about work, and now I'm working, working, working!

I have a big chunk ready on Chris. I am ready to write! I think the more I work on the project, the more excited I get for it. I hope people will like it, even if it's way out of my wheelhouse. I can't do much about the presentation of it all, so I'm having to trust in people I haven't ever worked with more than usual. There's also the Stamps Game, which will stay as an codename until it's formally announced, which caps and I have done a lot of really great work on. Rain is maybe my favorite character as of right now.

The biggest thing I've worked on has actually been OHMK. I did a 20 second teaser trailer for it and I've been working on getting the backend setup. I'm excited! The music is so incredible and the art is so much more expressive than most of our other games.

All of this chalks up to a couple nights now where I haven't been able to sleep at all. There's so much I want to juggle at once that I can't turn off my brain.

In less work-related news, I started watching PsychOdyssey, a documentary about the making of Psychonauts 2. It's really crazy both how similar and how different it is to work in the games industry from an indie project to a slightly more AA project. I'm a huge documentary fan and I really like how this one is edited together in particular—I get to see enough of the behind-the-scenes work to relate to the developers and their very specific "I'm making a game" struggles, but I'm still surprised when I see how things come together in the more showcase-y type clips.

Anyway! I hope I'll be able to update this more often. It's nice to look back on. I updated this page to be separated by season so it won't be so... empty... LOL. Take care and thanks for reading!

I SAID IT.

It's really such a shame too. The first few episodes are genuinely incredibly fun, and the concept of these generators being so high-value that friends would turn on friends to get one is great. But my god. It gets so high concept and just drops the ball over and over and over in the end. It felt rushed... I really liked the reporter character and his dying just felt like... nothing.

Nai reading The Bible(tm) in their garden of Eden was just so ridiculous I laughed out loud. The amount of imagery and "woah so deep" it got to at the end was just... ugh. The pregnant plants cmooon 😭

Anyway That's All. My birthday came and went. Bleh. Summer vacation has left me really busy, I guess. I'd like to read the manga for Trigun and maybe see if it catches me more because Vash is an incredibly likeable character!!! I really wanted more of him. Guess we'll see!

Beeh awhile!!

Been hard at work at various things. Mostly working on some various art stuff, like helping with rendering out a print for OKE and making a merch club print. I wish I had more discipline to write... I'm thinking of taking my laptop out and going to the library to focus. It's not cliche if it works!

I'll probably write more later today or tomorrow.

Basically, I feel like the last couple days have been a mini weekend for me. I haven't done anything!! I chipped away at some Summer work, writing and leaving feedback, but honestly, I've just been playing Rabbit & Steel and relaxing for the grand majority of it. Tomorrow I'll really get back to it. Hopefully!

I'll have to focus on TOYBYB a bit to try and make some good progress. We have a meeting on Saturday so, y'know. I really want this project to work out. It's a little hard for me to write with so many cowriters and also not knowing what I'm working towards in regards to the overall game, but I'm going to bring that up when we do our chat.

Last little thing is... the yearning. My god the yearning is so bad. I don't know what it is, maybe because it's Spring, maybe because I'm in my feels a lot lately. I haven't been single in over a decade. It's been over half a year since I separated with my ex. Seven months probably seems like a short time to go from married to single and down bad but honestly, it's sort of felt like it's been two years. Four if you count the Covid-era, which was just not good at all. I don't know. It's been a short time officially, but emotionally, there's a level of emotional connection I've been wanting and denied for so, so long. The yearning is hard. I can't imagine myself dating anyone at this point in my life anymore, though. Dating with a kid is a pretty tough bargain to begin with. Well, whatever... Just a weird state to be in, I guess.

The release went great!

I'm really, truly proud of what we made. I know I said I would post this update the day after I was done, but honestly I think I needed a day or two to unwind from it. It's required a lot of last-minute work, more than I had anticipated, but I really had only my own poor planning to blame for it.

I spoke to my mom about it briefly, as I had slept in 'til around noon on Mother's Day after falling asleep at 7am. She asked about how much I was getting paid for it and I explained to her how it was released for charity. She scoffed at me, saying, "All that work and you're not even paid for it?

Maybe it's something that peopel who don't create feel. The lack of worth in something unless you earn from it. I won't lie, it would be nice if every single thing I released helped me or my daughter financially. I don't think that desire should be the primary motivator behind my work, though.

Speaking bluntly, I do get paid for work. For illustration, for writing, for little gigs I pick up here and there. I like doing it. But Perfect Circle isn't a gig. It isn't a job. It's the first game I've ever directed and written and done all the art for. It's something I got so passionate about that I desperately drew art for 12 hours just to release an artbook. Getting feedback that it made someone emotional, or that it was a good read, or that it was worth the time someone dedicated to it is why I worked on it.

So I don't know. I guess I feel a little somber about it. It's out there, and its raised a bit of money for some charity that's incredibly important. I hope its good.

... That's it, I guess.

PS: I started playing Rabbit & Steel. It's a good game!! Assassin is my favorite, but I'm starting to get into Druid a bit more too.

Perfect Circle...

It's done.

Longer post tomorrow, probably, after I sleep. But caps and editor-san both have saved me with work calls and keeping me company. We release today!!!!

By the way, I'm marking this as 5/11, but really it's 5/12 at 5:19AM. I just didn't sleep so it doesn't really count as a new day...

And with that...

PERFECT CIRCLE IS DONE

Well, at least the build is! We still have a few more assets to work on, but the last couple days have been so busy I forgot to write a devlog about it. I finished up the coding for PC's screens, including the music room and all that, and even got an android build running.

I'm so proud and excited to share it!! It's been awhile since I felt this pre-release high so intensely. I hope people like it. I hope the artbook is fun to read. I hope I hope I hope it all goes well.

Just a couple more days and it'll be out there... Wowie!!

WOW!! I got so much done today!

All of the art for PC is now done. The final scene has a total of 9 new illustrations, and then I also did 10 sketches for the new voice sliders. I also got a huge amount done on the UI, splashscreen, and overall setup for release.

I'm feeling really good about the release. I have a bit more to do now with regards to the artbook, OST, and other UI elements, but I'm really proud of the work I got done today. Releasing on Sunday is IN SIGHT!

Here's a couple images since I promised to share some yesterday.

Coloring coloring coloring. Finished the most ambitious CG of the PC Stand Alone version, so I'm hopeful the rest will go fast! There's one more with a background that I think might take a little bit of time, but nowhere near as long. I also did a TON of little scrapbook pieces for the artbook, since caps is going to work on putting that together. I can't wait to see what they come up with. I'll post some images next time, but I'm headed to bed early* for some extra rest so I can work tomorrow morning at full capacity!

My beverage of choice the last two nights has been Sapporo by the way. I also bought some Kinsen plum wine for release day. Cheers 🍻!

*And by that I mean before 2:30AM. Hehe.

Had a nice day today. Went out for hot pot and came home and relaxed. At the end of the day, hopped on a call to work some more on PC. We watched some of House, and then swapped over to The Bear (rewatch for me!) while I chipped away at it.

We went to Chinatown/South Side, and so that on top of watching The Bear made me really yearn for the city again. Chicago's really such a gorgeous place. The other week I was driving on the Loop towards North side, and as I was passing through I looked out my window down the street where the sun was setting. It was really so beautiful. I think some day I'd like to live in the city proper. It's just my favorite place to be.

Anyway, I finished lining more CGs and started some rough colors. I think I'll be good on the schedule for PC, but we'll see. Gonna call it for the night for now though... Be well

How is it the weekend already!?

Only feeling a slight... slight!!! amount of panic at the thought. I've done so little compared to what I wanted to... It's a little scary! I'm going to leave this post half-written for now. Watch me come back and I'll have more to say! Yeah! I won't even save it yet. Just gonna leave it open, ready, waiting for me to come back with progress to report. BRB!

hello. it is 5/5. anyway i got back to where i was line-wise before the great "theo forgot to fuckin save" debacle of 2024.

that's it. be well!!!!

It's May!

I wrote 3.2k words in the last couple days for TOYBYB. I came to the realization that I don't think I've ever actually written men as love interests before. For fanfiction sure, but not for a game or something where I want a reader to like them. I'm not really putting any extra thought into it, just a fun fact.

Obviously I also put a lot of time into this blog too. I'm enjoying it a lot. It'd be fun to give each page its own style. I went with Quinn/yellow here :)

I'm not sure if I'll do anything else before bed yet. After I finish writing this I'll probably just go ahead and make myself a coffee, see what I'm feeling then. It'd be nice to get more PC stuff done today since I was going to yesterday, but AM had a rough night so I wasn't feeling up to it... and now tonight is basically repeating that lol

Here's a song that didn't make it into my monthly May jams. It sorta feel off the roster but if I had started doing this in April, it'd definitely be there.

Anyway that's it. Be well