The Big 30
Happy Shinji Month
It was my birthday this month! I turned 30! Wow! I tried pretty hard to be nonchalant about my twenties ending, but… it’s kind of freaky, to be honest!!
My friends reassured me by telling me that nothing really changes, except that your joints will randomly start hurting. Hmm…!
Anyway, I like that my birthday is in June because it reminds me that the year is halfway over with, and that death is inching its way closer and closer to me. 😇
I took a look at the bingo cards I set at the start of this year - I’ve made decent progress on them so far.
I need to play more games… but it seems like I’ll be able to get at least one line on my creative bingo card! Whew.
I have been watching a bunch of movies, though! At the pace I’m going at, I’ll be able to double the amount of movies I watched last year. Despite graduating from a film school, I am admittedly pretty uncultured about film as a medium! I’d like to slowly fix that moving forward. One way I’m fixing that is by watching Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical.
What else is up in the life of this 30 year old?? Well, I’m in the midst of working on my Toxic Yuri game jam VN, but I have extremely low faith that I can actually finish writing the whole story and scripting it together in Ren’Py. Life is too busy! So I might just cut my jam submission down and focus on just finishing the first chapter. We’ll see.
And, I recently attended a queer games event in Tokyo! It was my first time doing something like speaking at a panel. My friend kc invited me to talk about making games as a queer developer and queer games chat in general. Many thanks to the organizers CJ and kc for their hard work - I had a really good time. You can view the zine here!
There definitely needs to be more queer spaces focused on games/game dev. In general, but especially so in Tokyo.
I’ll finish with some captures of an unfinished game jam project that I was working on with my good friend Hazi! They did the character art and helped defined a lot of the visual style. This is basically Touhou but ikemen.
Sorry these are crappy distorted gifs I’m too lazy to figure out how to export these nicely. Also we were kind of going for shitty graphics anyway so it’s fine………
It was a great project for me to learn Godot for the first time! I was really surprised at how lightweight the engine is. I feel like Rock Lee taking off his weights when I go from working in Unity to working in Godot. I had a pretty good rhythm going on, where I would spend an hour almost every morning working on the game.
Ultimately I ran out of time to wrap up the project and fix outstanding bugs, but I’m still really happy with how much I learned! If I were to return to this project I’d like to think a bit harder about the bullet hell implementation. It’s pretty hard to find the right balance of fun in a bullet hell-like game.
Also… I want to work with my friends more!!! If there are any rich billionaire oil princes out there that want to fund my woke indie games, please hit me up.
And with that… goodnight and happy Pride month! 🌈