Tag: Self-Reflection (Page 1 of 2)

A series of blog posts in which I reflect on the kind of person I am.

Premade assets vs. building from scratch

February 17, 2025 / Jesse / 0 Comments

(Shout-out to every software developer who ever inherited a legacy project, took one look at it, and decided “I should rewrite all of this because I don’t like how it looks right now.”)

So, I’m back in on the game development hobby. Just as I predicted in my January update, all the recent Switch games I played got me revved up and full of energy to do some game making of my own—and then, with that foundation primed, inspiration struck me at the exact right time with a game idea that I think is pretty darn cool and would also probably take years to fully develop. (Sorry, vaguely conceived competitive multiplayer platformer, you just weren’t the right idea for the right time. Maybe in the future—the far, far future.)

But for now, since I’m back to square 1 with game dev, and since I’m still painfully aware of my limitations when it comes to, well, everything that goes into it (i.e., all the art and music, since I at least have a solid foundation for the programming and writing)—I find myself asking various flavors of the question, “How much do I want to build a game completely from scratch, vs. the potential of using some free/licensed assets that an actual artist made specifically for people in my position?”

It’s a question that goes a lot deeper than art/music assets.

My game engine of choice is Unity, despite the whole Runtime Fee drama in 2023, and despite even more drama as recently as last week about the future of the engine. I like Unity because its GameObject/Component system feels pretty intuitive to me, very much unlike Godot’s Node-based approach. (But I’m very happy for the people who find Godot more intuitive than Unity! I want them both to succeed.)

But sometimes I’ll also start thinking about how the Unity Engine would add a bunch of bloat that my games wouldn’t need. (At least, I assume that when I build a near-empty Unity project and the resulting .exe is already 30+ MB, a lot of that is the bloat of things like, physics engine code that isn’t ever used because it’s an empty game.) And then I start thinking, maybe I could follow in the footsteps of ConcernedApe, the creator of Stardew Valley, and develop my games with the MonoGame framework.

If I did that, I’d pretty much have full control over the code of my games. But, it would also mean I’d have to spend a few years re-implementing basic things that Unity would have taken care of for me entirely. Basic graphics and audio handling, collision systems, heck even physics in general if I ever want to go back to that platformer idea. But then what if I want to add multiplayer to that platformer? I guess I just need to hope I’m a good enough programmer by that point that I can handle it all myself?

Nope. That’s a LOT of pointless reinventing the wheel. I’ll just stick to Unity for now, which still has tons of community resources and plugins and tools, including for multiplayer.

Okay, so that’s one layer of the question answered. What about art?

The day I had my big game idea, I went and impulse bought a bunch of 2D pixel art game assets on itch.io. (In my defense, I had already known some of them were on sale, and some of those sales were going to end in just a few hours!) Of course, I haven’t used any of them yet (whoops, my knack for getting hyped over tools is still going strong it seems), but I’m quite happy to have them as a fallback option. And also, I’m happy to have them as a resource for getting started with learning to make pixel art.

I think for this new attempt at a game dev journey, I want to do it with my own artwork. I want to toil through making a grassy/forest tileset in Aseprite, down to picking the colors in the palette myself, so that when I put a finished product together—whether its a sample project I make in a week to test out a new game feature I want to practice with, or whether it’s the big one that’ll take me years—I want to be able to look at it and think, “I made everything I’m looking at here,” and be proud.

Remember the junky blocky platformer I showed a gif for during my last gamedev-venture? It had a generic animated rotating 2D coin sprite in it. I made that coin sprite and animation myself, over the course of literally multiple nights in Aseprite’s animation editor. (It took so long because I’m that bad at art, currently, but also because I get distracted very easily.) I’m still so dang proud of that stupid coin sprite, even if it’s nothing special to anyone else. For me, that coin sprite is some kind of metaphor for perseverance. It’s proof that, if I put in the time and the effort, I can make something that looks good.

Of course, this time I’ll be doing a lot more research on color theory and hue vs saturation and how color palettes work and just artistic design in general. I’ve got a lot of reading and practicing I need to do, but that’s all part of the fun for me.

Anyway, that’s another layer of the question answered! How about music?

While I’d love to be able to go full ConcernedApe or full Toby Fox, and make literally everything myself, from the code to the art to the music, at some point I gotta draw the line and recognize there’s only so much time in a day. (Especially since this is only a hobby! I’ll be doing all this in my off-time.)

Honestly, if I ever get as far as actually needing music for a game, I’d be thrilled to commission a musician to make a full soundtrack! God I love game soundtracks. Before I recently played Cassette Beasts, I had known about the game for a few years already, but I had next to no interest in playing it myself—until I heard its absolute banger of a battle theme, which immediately convinced me to get the game and then I fell in love with the rest of its soundtrack. Zero regrets.

Of course, that’s so far away that it’s barely worth thinking about right now. Not while I’m still at the level of “learning how to draw blades of grass in MS Paint,” practically speaking.

And now that I’ve procrastinated another hour away by writing this post, it’s time to get back to drawing blades of grass after picking good shades of green. Wish me luck!

I sort my video games in reverse chronological order

January 16, 2025 / Jesse / 0 Comments

Here’s a pointless and, honestly, embarrassing fact about me: I sort my video games in reverse chronological order of when I originally got them. I’ve been doing it for over twenty years at this point, and I don’t know how to stop.

Leaving behind toxic productivity

October 22, 2024 / Jesse / 2 Comments

This post is another sequel in my vaguely defined productivity tracking series of blog posts. With any luck, this will also be the last.

What I would do if I ever found a time machine

May 10, 2024 / Jesse / 1 Comment

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I’d stay as far away from it as possible.

Love the journey, not the destination

February 21, 2024 / Jesse / 1 Comment

Once, a long time ago, I was told there are two kinds of writers. There are those who love writing—who delight in the craft of it, the mental and physical labor of putting words to paper or screen, to construct the narrative their heart yearns to share—because to them, that effort is no labor at all.

And then there are those who love having written—the dreamers, the thinkers, the ones who say for years that they’re working on a novel, with most of that time spent imagining the finished product and taking no tangible steps to get there. In short, they’re the ones who don’t actually write.

But this post isn’t about writing. It’s not about any one particular subject, or activity, or even logical context. It’s about healing from trauma, and the inner strength it takes to stick to the difficult path. It’s about mortality, and finding meaning in a nihilistic universe whose lifespan is just as finite as yours. It’s about life, the universe, and everything, and also nothing at all, because it’s about a frame of mind that can be applied to just about any situation to make it better or more bearable. It’s about enduring.

It’s about the journey.

Getting hyped on tools you won’t use

November 15, 2023 / Jesse / 4 Comments

A few years ago, the writing app Scrivener was gearing up for its next major release. Scrivener for Windows v3.0 had been in beta for ages, with a long list of new features to bring the app (mostly) up to par with its macOS older sibling. My writer friends and I were hyped as all heck for the shiny new software, even contributing to the beta testing cycle a little bit because we were so impatient to start using v3.0 for real.

And then, finally, after multiple months of delays, Scrivener for Windows v3.0 was officially released! I cheered internally and immediately bought the non-trial version of the app… And then I forgot all about it, and never used it, because I never used the previous versions of Scrivener to begin with.

I do a lot of things as a joke

November 1, 2023 / Jesse / 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking about this part of my personality a lot lately. There are lots of things I like and/or do that are objectively silly, and probably shouldn’t be taken seriously, but I do them sincerely anyway to add to the joke.

I don’t quite think it’s the same as “doing things ironically.” There’s a very specific feel to all of these things; it’s not just being dumb for the sake of being edgy. It’s more like… an elevation of sorts. Taking a silly idea and respecting it in its own right, laughing with it instead of at it. If that even makes sense.

Anyway, here’s some examples.

That One Insignificant Moment

September 8, 2023 / Jesse / 3 Comments

There was a morning, back when I was in middle school. The bus was turning up the school’s little hill of a driveway, and I was lying back, tired, trying to squeeze just another minute or two of rest out of the morning before I had to face an entire day at school. It was a typical morning, similar to hundreds of others before it, and probably after it. A completely unexceptional, worthless moment of transition between the parts of the day that actually mattered.

And somehow, for some reason, I realized all of that in that moment.

I realized I was living through the most mundane, unremarkable moment in time. A moment that would soon be forgotten by everyone on the bus, including myself, because what reason was there to remember it? A moment so defined by its insignificance that, in just a few more days, or hours, or maybe even minutes, it would be like that moment never happened at all.

So I decided to remember it.

I didn’t want that moment to not matter. I didn’t want that moment to be as insignificant as it was destined to be. I didn’t want it to be forgotten and therefore die, losing every effect it ever had on anyone who lived through it.

I couldn’t rescue every moment in eternity from its inevitable oblivion, but I could rescue that moment, on that one day, on that one morning, on that utterly insignificant bus ride before school.

And so I remember it. I remember all the silly things that were going through my head as I made that vow of remembrance, which I’ve now shared here (without too much extra dramatization—I was a dramatic child, inside my own head).

I remember the feeling of defiance that went into the act, the feeling of struggle against an impossible enemy—eternity itself. The feeling of borrowed/mutual insignificance, because I too was just screaming against the void of Forever. Someday I would be forgotten too, and the world would move on as if I never existed.

But for now at least, for just one lifetime, I could remember—and therefore keep alive—that one insignificant moment.

Being Rigorously Unrigorous

June 28, 2023 / Jesse / 0 Comments

I’ve just about finished playing Tears of the Kingdom, and the current state of my life leaves me wanting to write an introspective blog post. Specifically, a follow-up to my Sprint System Retrospective. (Which itself was a follow-up post, so I guess this is an entire series now. Mark it, it’s canon. Let’s get an official label on this thing.)

Those fleeting moments when I don’t think in words

April 11, 2023 / Jesse / 0 Comments

Sometimes, very rarely, when I wake up in the middle of the night to pee, or if I get out of bed immediately after waking up in the morning—for the first minute or so of being awake, my brain won’t think in words.