A bilious 2015 retrospective
What did I accomplish in 2015? Too much, really, of the wrong things.
I essentially wrote only one (extremely long) chapter of my major Twine story, Six Months. I rewrote large chunks of earlier parts of the story, but that editing fuckery can be poor comfort. I also made the decision to port it to Unity eventually, and to make it a tablet-first experience.
I wrote all of Other Orbits, a collection of nonlinear short stories, but am waiting on art and edits to the second and third stories before releasing it. I am also considering abandoning the collection idea and just releasing them separately. I need to release more shit.
I actually released more games in 2015 than in any other year. I did a shit ton of game jams. I started Plus Ultra with my friends Kent, Rosstin, and our many A+ collaborators, and we made four games: Detective City, our criminally-under-valued Snowpiercer parody Slaughtertrain, and both a web and a mobile version of Monstr, a dating game about monsters. These were all jam submissions. Monster ranked in the top 25 in Ludum Dare for comedy.
I failed to write any movies this year, despite trying multiple times.
I wrote about seventy pages of a sci-fi novel you will probably never see. This is the third time I have rewritten those beginning 60-80 pages since beginning the project in 2013. There is a high chance you will never see it. It’s fucking great, though. It’s a bromance story between a Jules Verne Hero Man and his best friend, Fish Jesus From Another Dimension, and it realizes that theme of alien friendship I tackled over and over again in five or six different projects in 2014. I haven’t gotten it out of my system yet.
All in all, I frittered a large amount of my energy away this year on projects for work which have subsequently been cancelled. I spent a lot of this year feeling very thwarted. My personal and professional plans were thwarted multiple times; I was in a major car crash and had to commute by foot in LA for over a month; I was sent on very long and exhausting business trips; my home was infested by fleas, forcing me to sleep on a small childrens’ trampoline in my living room for two days in a row; my job changed dramatically in ways I could not control. I felt constantly as if I had some sort of bitter bile of frustated rage in my teeth. I felt like I’d gone on a walk to the store, been mauled by a dog in someone’s front yard, and forced to keep on limping along the side of the road like a chump while cars whizzed by and sprayed me with gravel. I’m sorry, that’s very specific, but it’s how I felt from about June onwards. I walked to work a lot in October and was quite literally sprayed with gravel by passing cars many times. I was not, however, mauled by a dog.
I am now twenty six years old and I will soon be twenty seven and I have not created any good big-time adult-pants dramatic art which large numbers of people have seen, so my high school self would be extremely disappointed in me. I think I’d try to explain to her that being an adult is exhausting and that all adults are held powerless to other adults, bigger adults, and the systems they have created, but I think that younger version of me would refuse to accept such an explanation.
And to be honest, I refuse, too.