This month was kind of a mess.

I have a Google Doc named “Daily Doings 2023,” where every day I add a bullet point or two (or more!) for any noteworthy things I accomplished that day, or anything interesting that happened to me in general. And looking back at the September section of that doc confirms it: this month was, in fact, a big mess.

Last month, I ended up working on Porydex again, in an unexpected revival of a project I assumed I had lost all interest in. This month, I continued to work on it… for a few days… during which time, the many unfinished and half-finished Porydex tasks in progress became an utterly tangled mess, and I started going in circles every single day, not making any new progress.

So I just stopped. And a few days later, the first part of the Pokémon Scarlet/Violet DLC came out, and thus Porydex is now even further behind in how much data I need to add.

To anyone who’s considering ever doing such a thing: maintaining a fully relational SQL database of fully cross-generational Pokémon game data is really, really hard. Especially in these post-Dexit generations, where the game data is more fragmented than ever. It sucks!

But I still want to do it anyway.

I’ll probably get back to working on Porydex in a few days. That data ain’t gonna sort itself, after all. (Plus, there’s another reason I put the project back on pause: for the last few weeks, I turned what had been my “work on Porydex” time into “read a few more arcs of the web serial Katalepsis” time. I’m pretty sure I’m done with that again for a long while.)

And then there’s the dumpster fire that the Unity corporation decided to start.

***

I’m so mad.

I finally found some actual goddamn passion for a creative hobby again, after URGY burned me out for years. I finally got back in touch with some of my deepest, least-explored creative roots: game dev. (Fun fact! Even though I ended up getting a standard Computer Science degree and going into webdev as a career, the first reason I chose my college because they had a game dev program!)

I finally do all those things and start playing around with Unity and realize I actually kind of love it and decide to go all in on learning Unity and using Unity to develop my games—AND THEN THE COMPANY DECIDES TO LIGHT THEMSELVES ON FIRE AND ALIENATE MOST OF THEIR CLIENTS.

(Okay, that was enough. I just needed to yell about it once.)

A few days ago they finally walked back on the worst parts of their insane new “Runtime Fee” business plan, so the fire is pretty much out by now. But in that week and a half that they left us hanging, they may have effectively killed the Unity community. A lot of developers announced they’d be leaving Unity forever, whether right away or for all future projects. Will they follow through? Only time will tell.

In that week and a half, I went back to the drawing board and evaluated some other game engines—along with trillions of other “Unity refugees,” as they’re now being called. I tried out Godot Engine for a bit, but wasn’t satisfied. I read up on some others (Unreal, Stride, MonoGame), but in the end, I decided to stick with Unity. It has all the capabilities I want, and can build for all the platforms I want.

So anyway, after that brief but stressful pause, I started a new game project. This is an idea I’ve had for about ten years now, and I’m excited to finally put it together. Although, I have no idea yet whether it’s even a good concept for a game. I’ll figure that out in another week or two when the prototype is playable enough.

***

Currently reading: Katalepsis

Last year I read up through Arc 10 and quit for a long time because the story got itself into a huge, tens-of-thousands-of-words-long slog.

I just read Arcs 11 and 12, which were better, but… I think I’m done with this story for good now. Like most web serials, Katalepsis could easily lose 50-75% of its word count without losing any plot, any character development, anything at all really. And I really like the characters and plot!

But as a story, it’s so ridiculously long-winded when it absolutely doesn’t need to be. The average chapter is over 7,500 words. Like… Does this author not read physical books? Do they have any idea how absurdly long that is?

Maybe I just need to wait for the audiobooks to get this far and I’ll continue with those.