Oh, been a while since last news huh?

Recently the Mobile Game Jam ended and now that I am sentenced to a few months of college taking up most of my week I've had plenty on my mind to talk about.

Ever since releasing the ENA: Decimation Journey demo, the reality has been that 25k+ don't equal much in the way of actual interest in any of your other work. You don't see people really excited or much of anything for even FIGHTER.NET outside of my gang of buddies I love to do things with.

And you know, I try to act all tough and awesome as some kinda indie one man army whose friends are his power (keyblade not included) but at the end of the day I'm still human and still affected by considerably petty things like seeing everyone else be more successful than me. The world doesn't revolve around me but I can't help but feel like I should be getting more recognition, dammit.

TACTILE and EDJ's demo were just utter exercises in my serious dedication to building games almost entirely by myself, one a spiritual successor of sorts to my first ever game, a Chip's Challenge clone, the other a ENA jrpg fangame attempting to be about as ENA as you could get with such a concept and an original setting.

But I mean, nobody really cared much about TACTILE (outside of my buddy artist RoligtJackson because he is awesome, and Demisurge who did some music too) and EDJ at the end of the day didn't really do much. People loved it but you wouldn't really be able to tell from a few glances. Heck, the trailer for the demo managed to score 2 trophies, and we still got rated 4th best game of the month, so those are huge accomplishments. I guess with such a large thing you expect way more?

Which is where my trouble lies. Should I expect anything? What is the point, really? We are all conditioned by social media in some fashion to expect some kind of pseudo feedback for whatever we said or took a photo of through micro interactions and it seeps into other facets of making things online and honestly it was best to just let that go when working on FIGHTER.NET. I went into it with the idea I will ultimately win nothing, get nothing, and not be recognized for anything, and it significantly cleared my mind and made me much happier.

In fact, I'll go so far as to say this game is more of an artifact than anything. The real joy I had was all the days I spent with my devteam just having fun playing games and talking about stuff. Making things for you and your folks first just turns out a lot less toxic mindset than thinking about all the prizes and fame you'll get. You will get nothing in return first and foremost, because you are not entitled in any way to such a thing. I wish artists did get more pay, serious problem, but that's a different topic.

When you do not care about superficial nonsense it makes games development that much less stressful! The joy of creating is way more interesting and fulfilling. I think some of us could use a mindset like this when it comes to creative work in general.

Look, my next release won't even be something interesting either. I'll be remastering... A remake of a certain game from a few years ago and it's been fun getting to put in new assets and animation, try to get a little closer to what I intended it to have. It will be desktop only for the time being due to being my new custom engine but honestly, I don't need to be worried about having my games on Newgrounds all the time. You too are not entitled to my work, and sometimes certain things will take longer to appear in certain places and that's ok.

After all, the fun is in getting to make cool stuff, nonsense like appealing to the common denominator is dumb. I ain't a AAA studio!