2024-11-27
WARNING: this post contains me being overly sad and makes passing reference to self-destructive habits & behaviours.
i'm a fairly emotional person nowadays. getting on HRT in 2019 and then getting older has led me to this interesting place where almost anything can make me cry, even if something isn't sad... it's just beautiful, for example. i'm not complaining; i actually love having this mindset. especially compared to how i was pre-HRT and pre-transition, a misanthropic teenager who didn't really care about anyone else. needless to say i'm pretty glad that i'm not that person anymore.
i'm writing this post because over the last few months i've been sifting through all my pre-2022 gamedev work, found on various old harddrives or buried 17 layers deep in massive folder trees. it's been interesting to see where i was at these times, from 3 years ago all the way to 10 years ago. it seems like i consider 2-3 years to be the cutoff before my prior work starts to feel shameful, rather than "current" or "good".
one thing that has been making me consistently sad to look back on is my work for Boreal Alyph. i was on that team from November 2019 to July 2021, at which point the project dissolved. my contributions were fairly minimal; i made a handful of gameplay testmaps and wrote a few story drafts (which can be read on my website here), none of which got much attention from within the team. ultimately, i feel like i wasted the chance i had by getting accepted onto the team. maybe that's why it makes me so sad every time i look at it. there was so much potential, both in me and the team as a whole, that i feel was squandered. but what can you do? the project's development was kinda languishing towards the end, and everyone seemed to agree that we weren't able to see it through. and so it went.
and now that a build of Boreal Alyph has leaked online, it feels like opening an old wound somehow. i don't think any of my work ended up in that build, but i haven't checked. i know for sure that many of the former team members are unhappy that the build got leaked; people getting to see your work in an unfinished, unpolished state is usually a bad experience for both artists and developers. i can certainly relate to that feeling. i've deleted so many webpages, images and videos showcasing my old work because i really didn't want people to see "that side of me" or i didn't want that stuff to "represent" me.
it's probably a self destructive habit, i know. but at this point i certainly prefer to keep a somewhat cryptic internet presence. the people who like what i do usually know where to find me. even if it means i'm regularly fielding emails and discord messages asking "where i can find <x>? i know you made it 8 years ago but where is it now?".
i'm not really sure how to wrap up this post, especially considering it's just me rambling about being sad and pitying myself. i hope at some point in the future i can muster the courage to actually do some legitimate retrospectives of my prior work, and showcase it honestly for whatever value it holds. but now is not that time. right now, i just feel like an idiot.