The image above is one that I commonly link to friends who announce their birthdays over social networks. A fun jab, but also a grim reminder that life’s short.
I’m half-way to 74, which was at one time the average life expectancy for a Japanese male. I’m not sure if I’ve gone through a mid-life crisis yet, though I have been looking rather seriously at the latest model Dodge Challengers, perhaps an equivalent to a Harley Davidson for someone who doesn’t ride motorcycles.
This also means I must once again traverse the stretch of time that’s brought me from birth to this point, and on reflection it’s a hell of a long journey. One that at one point I never thought I’d make very far.
When I was 17 I was a drug-dealing low-life on his way to rock-bottom. I often celebrated the fact that we were all living fast and hard and on our way to dying young and leaving good-looking corpses. If you couldn’t romanticize what you were doing, there wasn’t much point to doing it. I honestly never thought I’d make it to 25.
I crashed hard into the bottom when I was 21. Penniless and strung out, malnourished, spiritually broken, living hand-to-mouth and falling into a dirty, sweat-stained mattress at the end of each harrowing day there were really only two options left. Die, or climb out of the hole I’d dug those past 5 years.
Obviously I made the “positive” choice. I went back home, cleaned myself up, finished school, and got back on the path that I’d left as a younger man of 15, playing games on his NES and PC into the late hours of the night as Link and the Avatar of Virtue. The kid who loved Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy novels, and technology more than anything else in the world.
It would be another 6 years before I got some inkling of what I’d really wanted to do with my life. In that time I’d work as a sushi chef, waiter, security guard (fully licensed, educated in the fine arts of calling the police in the event of an actual crime), and English teacher. It would be 8 more years after that before I’d really be in the position to do what I wanted to do: make video games and write novels all day.
The point here is that it’s never too late to start something, but you’ve got to be prepared to run a long race, and it’s one that never really ends.
[Lost content, image. Alt-text “Exploded”. IIRC this was a screenshot showing the Unity layers we were using to assemble the art assets for Project Prevengeance.]
It’s been over 5 months since starting the first full collaborative project on the Acre, code-named Prevengeance. It’s a brilliant design by Darryl Spratt, and the first real “money” project I’ve done.
The thing is that shortly after we started work, Darryl got a job working on Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. It was going to be good experience for him, and more importantly a few months of salary. So we stopped working on Prevengeance, mostly due to certain contractual obligations on his end. I poked away at it here and there, but spent more of the time expanding my skillset.
As is often the case in the games industry, D’s contract came to an end and with it his employment. Now back on the bread-line, he can focus his energies on getting Prevengeance out the door. I’m now back working full-time on the game, and we’re doing our damnedest to get it into a state where it’s ready for the world. In development terms it’s still pre-alpha, meaning that it’s not quite fully playable. I’d say it’s got a little bit more to go before we can see if all the proposed designs will work together, and then after that things should happen very quickly to get it to market.
Follow the Dark Acre Games account on Twitter or the subscribe to the Dark Acre Page on Facebook to keep abreast of developments, if you’re keen on that kind of thing. Of course there’ll be an official announcement here once everything’s ready to go.
Depression is common among stay-at-home, self-isolated independents. It’s a condition that creeps over, slowly, insidiously, and the early warning signs can be quite easily dismissed as funks, “periods you’re going through”, or par for the course.
Left undiagnosed and untreated it can lead to all kinds of nasty things. It can wreck relationships and even end lives.
I started feeling a sort of distant malaise last year. I thought at that time that I was just burning out, working too hard, and a short jaunt to Japan would fix it. It turns out it ran deeper than that.
I was extremely resistant to getting diagnosed. It’s a scary thing. A lot of us have grown up under the negative stigma of mental problems, and how badly society treats people who could be perceived as “crazy”. It’s worse in a real workplace, never mind for an independent working for him or herself. In an office, if people think you’ve got mental issues, you could suffer all kinds of social shame. It’s even possible your career could take a turn for the worse as you get passed over for promotion for other more “reliable” candidates.
It’s a shitty reality to face. And then what, after diagnosis? Therapy? A lifetime of pills? All of these fears are real and justifiable.
Unfortunately they’re the lesser of two evils. If you’re sick, you need to get treatment. It’s what I did for 5 years of my life in the pursuit of the ultimate high. I was self-medicating back then, and I’d left the ultimate cause of my symptoms untreated.
It took me nearly 20 years to come to grips with the fact that there was something bothering me, something that had turned my personality against me and pushed people away.
Just talking to someone about it helped a lot, and then of course there’s the medication. My condition isn’t full-blown clinical depression, though it could have been if I’d left it to fester. If I’d been more of a drinker, or still been abusing drugs, it could have been much worse. Fortunately I’ve kept clean, and with a little bit of help I should be right as rain.
The interesting thing for me was, after leaving the doctor’s office for the first time with a better sense of what had been bothering me for most of life, I started to think of the other people I was passing in the street. How many others like me were keeping things inside themselves, festering, turning their own characters against themselves? Or how many more were currently being treated for such? People I’d dismissed as jerks and assholes might simply have been manifesting some deep-seeded and unaddressed psychological issues.
It really makes you think.
(I don’t know that I ever “recovered”. I went off the meds in 2015, and there’ve been worse days than my worst indie sads, but I’ve reached a state of near-total acceptance. I’ve chosen to face every day with unflinching resilience. It’s worked so far. –Ed.)
Thanks as always for your support, and stay tuned for further details on Prevengeance! Also, hope to see you at the upcoming Ludum Dare 48 special 10-year anniversary jam!
Until next time!
2012.03.01 – 2012.03.31