I’m going to make this the last progress post for the year, as I feel like December is not going to have much happening. Holiday chaos and depression kinda takes up all that time and energy.
For November, the final month in my window to release something within the fall quarter, I actually did manage to release something; In my excitement for Kirby Air Riders I managed to make a video about it in only a week. I was really proud of the turnaround and the quality of the video. Unfortunately it got sent to the shadow realm by the algorithm. So far it’s done worse than my Mecha Break videos, and I don’t understand how that happened.
It was so crushing and I don’t have any confidence in youtube as a platform for video posting anymore. The whole experience just compounded my despair about being trapped in obscurity. I’m growing more and more resentful of the people saying that we should just “create for the sake of creating” because that’s always being said by people who already have an audience, even if it’s a small one.
But the thing about art is that it’s meant to be shared. I don’t just create for the sake of creating, I create so I can share my messages to the world. Art is a form of communication with others, I want to have a dialogue and conversation with people, I want to interact with people in my comment sections, I want to have debates about the grand Ideas I propose, more than the act of completing something, audience engagement is the most rewarding aspect of creating.
Ask any actor or musician or stand-up comedian or gymnast. Do you think any of those mediums would be satisfying if people were just performing in front of a wall? If my stuff is unable to find an audience, one of the biggest motivators of creating art, then how am I not supposed to let that feel discouraging? And I don’t need to be a million view channel or be world famous, I would be fine with a small niche audience as long as I feel like I’m being heard.
But I don’t feel like I’m being heard, and it’s a problem I am no closer to finding a solution for in the 8 years I’ve been pursuing art as a career.
Guess that's also why I feel so… under-achieved this year. My goal this year was to throw as many things at the wall to find out what sticks. I couldn’t complete any comics, I couldn’t finish the Zelda RPG, I tried Youtube for a bit and that is clearly a dead-end given my time and resources, I haven’t found an avenue of success yet.
At this point I only have one wish in the world; a sign. More than anything I want a clear sign of what I need to do to get closer to my dreams.
However, to prevent this year from ending as a total bummer, there are some upsides. For one, I did achieve my baseline goal of releasing SOMETHING every quarter this year so… main quest accomplished I guess.
My mental health has continued to improve, even if ever so slightly. The complete democrat sweep at the beginning of November did so much to ease my existential dread. All year I’ve been in turmoil over the fact that I’m stuck on a planet going to hell and filled with people who won't do anything to stop it. But seeing such overwhelming support for the opposition against the fascist party, it has finally given me tangible hope that people are in fact paying attention and willing to do something about it.
I’m not as anxious about the future anymore cuz at least I have the comfort in knowing that there’s a majority out there who aren’t taking it anymore either and are going to do something if things continue to decline. I’m still scared shitless mind you, but at least I have a semblance of hope now which relieves some of the psychological burden.
We also got a new dog in the family, an 8 week old puppy. He’s a little bastard but he’s also the most precious baby ever and has predictably attached to me, even though I didn’t do much. Maybe because we’re the only males in the household and bros gotta stick together.
But it is true what they say, pets do improve mental health. Although it would be even better once he’s potty trained and I don’t have to keep cleaning up after him. Despite all my doom and gloom I often post on here, I try to be mindful of the things I do have. I still have a happy marriage with a wonderful wife who supports my efforts no matter what. I have a beautiful and healthy daughter, I have a mother that also supports me, I get along with most of my wife’s family, and we have a roof over our heads.
That’s certainly more than others have right now, and if it weren’t for them I wouldn’t keep going on this journey. I certainly wouldn’t be stable, probably would’ve gone super mario bros by now if I hadn’t met my wife.
I’m going to take it easy on myself this December. Gonna continue to enjoy Kirby Air Riders, rest where I can, write when I’m able to, and try to be kind to myself so I can do better next year.
I hope everyone reading this can have a holiday where they are able to do the same. If you can’t because of the things that have happened to you or are happening; it’s ok to feel the way that you do. Shit sucks right now. But there’s something we all can do to make it better. Saying you had enough is step one. Finding others who feel that way is step 2. Step 3 is something we’ll discover together in the coming year(s), but if you need some ideas right now, looking back at history would be a good starting point.
Welp, got some bad news bears. I wasn’t able to finish the Zelda RPG in time before Age of Imprisonment. My heart just isn’t in the project right now so I decided to put the whole thing on hold. I’m going to aim for a 2026 release now, but specifically when I can’t say, as I think I need some distance from the project in order to get back into it.
I think part of the burnout is the stress I’ve been feeling this month, which really sucks cuz October is usually my favorite month and halloween is my favorite holiday, but I couldn’t enjoy any of it because of the EVERYTHING.
However, I’ve taken some steps to address my mental health. I got myself a new doctor, one that’s closer to me and I finally got a refill on my anti-depressants. The past week there has been a positive difference, but I still feel so burnt out creatively it’s been difficult to get myself to work on anything. So when I get in these slumps I go back to working on my website, which has seen a massive overhaul visually.
I want my website to feel like something from the early internet, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I also uploaded more of my material on there including the final chapter of Mighty Machine Breaks the Lockdown and the first 3 parts of Garage Mechs.
I’ve also been writing a lot of non fiction. Seeing such turmoil in the world I’ve been thinking alot about morality and how we need a different take on what moral behavior and ideology should be, since the framework of ‘good vs evil’ has done nothing but be counter productive. The problem with binary morality, as in labeling everything as either good or bad and the bad needs to be purged at all costs, is that it makes it too easy for individuals to see themselves as the good guys and blind themselves from all the bad they’re doing.
So I’ve been doing a lot of philosophical writing in order to crystalize a new system of morality, one that I want to teach my daughter to better equip her for the broken world she’s inheriting. You may start to see this theming in all of my new works going forward from this point on, as I believe stories are the ultimate way of transmitting ideas.
I don’t know what I’m going to do for the remainder of the year. Gonna keep play-testing the mech SRPG, gonna count down the days until Kirby Air Riders, maybe work on another youtube video, idk man.
I wish I had some kind of sign to tell me what it is I should be prioritizing, that would help my motivation so much, direction on what is going to be the thing that's gonna grab my big break...
So some good news and some bad news and worse news.
The worst news is that it’s been a whole year and the orange goblin still isn’t fucking dead yet and his continued presence means my mental condition worsens everyday.
Bad news is that progress on the Zelda RPG is still at an absolute crawl. It’s only now fully dawned on me that I had bitten off way more than I could chew with this project. This was a problem I routinely faced with previous projects, including comics, and yet somehow I can’t learn my fucking lesson. I feel so discouraged with the amount of work that still needs to be done.
I think most of my anguish is coming from the fact that I still have descriptors for the 2nd dungeon that aren’t done, and I have completely tapped out of things to say and add to the game’s world. Then I still have to write out all the endings, boss dialogue, NPC’s in the main hub area that I still haven't written, and after all of that is done there’s the extremely tedious process of organizing all those pages together.
A 3 dungeon gamebook turns out to be too much for me to handle on my own. The Metroid RPG was so easy to make cuz it was only 1 dungeon. The Demo of the Zelda RPG was easy to make cuz that was also one dungeon, and there’s still the Mecha RPG gamebook that has also been shelved all year yet 80% done cuz that was also just 1 dungeon.
I will never make a gamebook this large ever again once this is done, IF it ever gets done.
On the good news side, I had my first play test of the Mecha SRPG done last night, and it was an absolute success! So far it’s hitting all my goals and I learned enough to make some needed tweaks, just need a couple more play-test sessions and hopefully a dedicated group that I can conduct more thorough tests with.
That’s the problem with reaching burnout with a project, not only does progress drag because of the low energy you’re able to put into it, but you also keep easily getting distracted by other things that have become more interesting to you. It’s a problem I have struggled all my life and still haven’t found a solution for.
This fact makes me feel like such a failure. So much is going on in the country right now and it feels like I’m not doing enough to contribute, all I’m doing is wasting my time with meaningless games that I’m not sure anyone’s even going to care about…
It will be a complete miracle if I get the Zelda RPG done before November like I intended. If it does, Amazing! If not… I honestly don’t know.
But when it comes to the Mecha-SRPG I’ll keep providing updates as the project develops.
TLDR: I’m not making Mecha Break Content anymore. Why? Read below.
I don’t know who will see this, or who will care, but just in case there’s even 1 person out there who discovered me through my Mecha Break Videos, I want to give them the generosity and courtesy of being transparent about the content they came here for. Any one who has a following owes that to their audience regardless of how small it is.
Since Mecha Break came out I was on a roll with releasing weekly videos. It has been the most video material I’ve released consistently ever in my life, and the initial plan was to keep doing it. However, the “What to loot” video has been my only successful video. Despite me using that video as a way to funnel people to my other content, it has done nothing to boost the rest of the videos.
Ever since the “Mecha Break Isn’t Dead” video, the viewership has completely tanked, and each video performed worse than the last. I wanted to stick to a weekly schedule because I was under the impression that the more videos I pumped out at a consistent basis, the more it would be pushed by the algorithm. Evidently that didn’t turn out to be the case at all.
It was a struggle to keep up with a weekly upload schedule, and it was taking away time I wanted to spend on other things. The truth is, I don’t actually want to be a youtuber. I follow a lot of youtubers, most of them doing this full time, and I see first hand how this career practically destroys them mentally, and how in spite of all the effort, many of them still struggle to make ends meet. All in the name of compromising their art and vision because youtube is more concerned about being a sanitized corporation now more than ever.
It’s not a life I want to live, it’s a life I can’t pursue because I have a family that I can’t take care of or give enough attention to if I tried to be a youtuber. All this channel will ever be is a strictly hobby space, and occasionally a place I can promote whatever my latest project or product is. But it will never be my medium of choice.
Obviously if doing Mecha Break content was pulling in numbers then maybe I could make youtube a side hustle to pay the bills instead of my current day-time job. But it’s clear now that’s not going to happen. I don’t know if it’s because the content itself is subpar, or Mecha Break really is dying and it’s not going to pull in a large enough audience to make channels like mine a worthwhile niche to carve into.
I don’t want the game to die, but even I can’t deny the declining numbers, and I myself haven’t played in ages. Not because I stopped having fun, but I had to spend my time making videos about it instead of playing it. But Nowadays my days are so busy and stressful that I don’t have the energy to play anymore. I’m not a teen or in my early 20’s anymore, I just don’t have the energy, time and motivation to keep up with a fast paced competitive game.
And I’ll be honest, it’s hard to not let all the doomers get to ya. I had to stop following the mechabreak subreddit cuz everyday there was another post about how the game is dying, and it really does become an obnoxious bummer after awhile. As an American I’m struggling to fight for so many things right now, I don’t have it in me to add another struggle on the list, especially when it’s something so inconsequential as a videogame from a foreign country that I realistically won't have a big impact on.
I could go on, just bearing all my emotions, but I think I made my point clear. I don’t plan on making any more Mecha Break content in the near future, not even more ‘State of Break’ episodes like I initially promised. I’m not a youtuber, I’m an artist and storyteller. I started making Meche Break vids cuz the game excited me, but now there’s another project that’s excited me, and I’ll share more details on that in my monthly reports on all the other platforms I post to.
To the person or people that subscribed to my channel or discovered my stuff because of my Mecha Break content, I’m sorry I’m unable to deliver the kind of entertainment you were seeking. But it’s my firm belief that an artist can’t perform if their heart isn’t into it, and providing a subpar performance to your audience is a form of robbery. They are giving you time and/or money because they trusted you to give them a good time, and being unable to meet that promise but demanding that time and money anyways is dishonest.
Whatever you may think of me, I hope to at least demonstrate honesty to you and to myself. But I wont stop making videos entirely, and if you’re at all curious as to what I’ve been working on instead and what I’ll be doing from here on out, read up my blog on my website, elonyx-media.net
Hmmmm…. I don’t know how to feel about this month. I feel like I’m supposed to feel proud, accomplished and productive, cuz I managed to release SIX youtube videos in one month, and I’ve made significant headway on the Zelda RPG. Almost all of the monster illustrations and UI stuff is done.
However, It’s not as much as I was hoping for. I’ve been able to get at least one drawing done a day while at my day job, but some days are busier than others so sometimes I don’t get any drawings done. As a result, I still feel behind on the development of the Zelda RPG. I wanted to get the game done by the end of August, but at the pace of things moving right now, that’s likely not going to happen.
I’m gonna have to settle with the Zelda RPG being released in the fall instead of August, and that really stings because I saw August as the best possible time to release the game. There’s a drought of meaningful Zelda content this year, so if there was any chance for the game to catch fire within the fandom, it would’ve been now before the new muso game in the fall.
In its place I’m treating the revamped activity of this youtube channel as the summer release for quarter 3. I want to see how far this channel can go on the format and work cycle I’m currently working under. My plan right now is to keep up the momentum and get at least 1 video out a week, for the rest of the remaining year.
So that’s 23 videos… which now that I count it all out feels a bit more daunting than I was expecting, so at a minimum I’m gonna aim for 12. I’m gonna treat this as a practice run: To see if I really have what it takes to create an audience on youtube which I can then use to get attention for all my other projects.
This year has been me just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Games, re-relasing my comic backlog on reddit, and now youtube. If I can’t keep up the upload rate or get burned out before the end of the year, then I’ll know that this isn’t the avenue for me and will go back to what this channel used to be: The occasional dumping ground of random video ideas.
It’s a lot, I know, but for some reason I tend to perform better when under pressure and have multiple things going on at once. But then again maybe I’m already over working myself. Maybe the reason I still feel empty at the end of this month is because I’m still depressed about the state of… everything.
So I’m trying to distract myself by inundating myself with projects. Speaking of distractions, one of the things I’ve been doing to stave off the darkness is getting back into F1 now that the summer break is over.
I’ve also been watching abuncha F1 shows and movies. Right now I’m going through Netflix’s Senna. So far it’s good but I hope Netflix had the balls to address the fact that the man was a pedo and that is not ok. NO I DON’T CARE IF THEY BROKE UP 3 YEARS LATER, THE MARRIAGE SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED TO BEGIN WITH!!
I hate how we have decayed as a society so much that we have to clarify why pedophilia is wrong.
I hate this country. I hate the people in it. I want the aliens to take me home.
Man… I was really feeling myself up last month cuz I got so much done. Then the first week of June happened.
So first, my mother-in-law had to get hospitalized ON MY BIRTHDAY! (She’s fine now) Then on the following Tuesday my phone died. Just- POOF- Dead. Battery was half full, no indication that something was wrong, no notifications, no notices, no updates, just POOF! Screen went black, and no matter how long I charged it, no matter what charger or cord I used, it would not wake up.
I had no idea a simple electronic tool could be so disruptive to one’s life. We as a society have become so overly dependent on smart devices that losing it is like suddenly being locked out of your own house. I hate this fact. At least I was fortunate enough to have a family member that had an iphone that wasn’t too out of date to give to me. Imagine how devastating it would be to not only lose your smartphone, but also pay a king’s ransom, or sell a kidney, or add ANOTHER monthly bill to buy a new one quickly?
Because I didn’t have access to a phone for several days, and had to spend several more days moving all my stuff back in, I couldn’t clock into my day job for a week. And because of THAT- I MISSED PAY WEEK, so now I have to wait FOUR FUCKING WEEKS to get my check, instead of two!! BiWeekly pay cycles need to be fucking illegal!!
AND I HAD SEVERAL TRAININGS I HAD TO SUDDENLY COMPLETE ON TOP OF ALL THIS SHIT!! AND JUST TODAY AS I’M WRITING THIS< MY DAUGHTER LOST MY GODDAMN CAR KEYS!!
And another consequence of my phone dying, is that I LOST ALL MY WIZARDRY WAIFUS!! My last phone was an android. My new phone is an iPhone. I can’t login and redownload all my save data cuz they were on two completely different store fronts! AND I CANT TRANSFER THE DATA CUZ MY PHONE WONT TURN ON SO i CAN’T GET A CODE TO TRANSFER MY ACCOUNT, MY WAIFUS ARE BEING HELD HOSTAGE BY THE PLANNED-OBSOLESCENCE DEMONS CONJURED BY TECH CORPORATIONS!!
I can’t rescue them until I can get my phone to a repair shop to get the data extracted, WHICH I CANT DO CUZ I GOT NO FUCKING MONEY!!!
So without my waifus to keep me occupied, I ended up back on reddit. And OF COURSE this HAD TO BE THE MONTH shit goes down in the middle east, and now my feed if filled with people declaring that WW3 is about to start. Which, in all honestly is not whats going to happen (people have been saying that every time the east lights up since 2006) but, ya know- STILL NOT A GOOD VIBE FOR MY DEPRESSED ASS!!
So basically, I got NOTHING done all month!
…well except Blade Busters. The updated pdf is now available on Itch.io. I have achieved my Q2 quota, so at least I could comfortably crash out for the rest of the month. Otherwise, this is the top contender of my worst month of the worst year of being an American. Yet, considering everything else that’s happening in this country, I’m hoping that this is the worst it gets for my personal life.
If anything, I’ve had the release of Mecha Break to look forward to. I’m gonna spend the first week playing that after suffering from mecha-withdrawels for four months. After I get that outta my system, it’s all Zelda RPG, all day* everyday* until it’s complete. (*or rather, for as many hours as a full-time working parent can be provided.)
Yes I know It’s almost the end of June. I wrote this in the first week of June, then SO MUCH LIFE HAPPENED. I’ll go into more detail in the June update, which at this rate is probably gonna be next week. Now, let's go back in time-
For once I feel like I’ve had a moderately successful month in terms of productivity. I’ve made A TON of progress on the Zelda RPG, including getting all the text for one of the dungeons complete and the 2nd dungeon 60% complete. I was hoping to get the text for both dungeons complete before the end of the month so I could focus on the minuscule NPC dialogue and tutorial section, but I had a belated start this month due to hiding my notes from myself.
I have a Nintendo-esque approach when it comes to game design, in that I design the mechanics first, then I write the story around what I’ve built to ensure mechanics and story enhance each other. In this case, I had already plotted out the maps of all the dungeons back in January or even November, and then locked them up when I shifted focus towards other things.
I couldn’t start writing until I found the maps and see how I arranged all the rooms so I could go- “ok these rooms are where the Moving Mangrove forest will go, and this is where the ship will go” so that the placement of all the locations and set pieces connected to each other in a logically within the world.
After that, I decided to take Yahtzee Crowshaws advise when it comes to maintaining drive on a project- write at least 1 page a day. Or in my case, write down at least 5 rooms a day. Each room descriptor is 1 paragraph at most, so 5 paragraphs should roughly equal one page.
I can attest that it does work, but it doesn’t account for the fact that sometimes life happens. The last few days of May I broke the streak because stuff just kept happening and I didn’t have the availability to write at all.
After this weekend I’m gonna try and get back into it. I feel the pull of mecha again so my goal for June is to finalize Blade Busters and get it out as a feature complete product so that I have something to show for a Q2 release. Then I’m spending all of summer prioritizing The Zelda RPG. This is the perfect window of opportunity for something like it to come out; there’s no new major Zelda title coming out this year so this is the only chance I have in the foreseeable future for this project catching on, both within the fandom and out of it.
If I can get the Zelda RPG done and Blade Busters complete, I will feel like I had accomplished enough this year. Then I can focus on creating anything else at my own pace, like all those video projects I’ve wanted to do, or the other games I’ve already started.
In terms of mental health, May has also been really good for me, mostly because I found something else to do on my phone instead of doom-scrolling on reddit. Funnily enough, that alternative is- of all things- a mobile gatcha game….
Yes, I’m firmly aware of the irony of trading one addiction for another, except this isn’t just another waifu slot machine, this is an actual video game first that is perfectly playable without paying into it at all. The game is Wizardry Variants Daphne, the newest entry in the ancient yet incredibly influential DRPG series, Wizardry.
Now this was going to be part of the update where I gushed about Wizardry, how good it is and how it got my game-designer brain going- But then life happened. How much life? Tune in next month to find out.
I don’t know how to start this month’s recap. I’m still half asleep from an unexpected nap I took because my daughter threw up in the middle of the night, two nights in a row. Now whatever stomach virus she got, I got, because she learned that sharing is caring except she shares the things I DON'T want.
So I completed the prototype for the other gamebook project I talked about last time, yet it was only today did I finally gather the balls needed to ask my local library for playtesters. My introverted ass kept putting it off and off until my self-inflicted deadline of… the end of the month.
After I finished the prototype… I kinda languished for the rest of the month. It’s been hard to stay on track and many things have been piling on my stress. It all culminated this week where the amount of stress I’ve been experiencing has gotten me sick and my wife forced me to be bedridden yesterday.
I think I’m going to double down on unplugging from the internet for the rest of the month. Really try to double down and focus on getting stuff done. I need to get that presentation uploaded, I need to get the blade busters video done, and I’m gonna work hard to get the Zelda RPG done by the end of June. If I can get the Zelda RPG done and the other gamebook project done by September, I’ll consider that a successful year in terms of productivity and releases.
That’s all I got this month. I know it’s not as detailed as I usually am, but I guess that speaks more on how tired I am. This month I’ve been feeling so burnt out on life in general. My family keeps me breathing at least, and there’s… SOMETHING that keeps me nudging forward on all these artistic endeavors. I don’t know what that thing is, motivation doesn’t feel right cuz I’m too depressed to feel determination.
In Xenoblade news, I got the flight module. I don’t know if my brain had been so fried from the stress, but using the flight module for the first time, witnessing my skell fly seamlessly from NLA to Primordia with no loading screens, flying around with such an overwhelming sense of freedom while cheesy music about letting go of your sorrows-
It brought tears to my eyes. After I landed, I didn’t sob, my eyes just watered uncontrollably for at least an hour cuz I was just so overwhelmed with this sense of joy and peace. It sounds so sentimental I know, but for all of Xenoblade X’s faults, especially the shitty music, it’s such a sincere game that’s not afraid to wear its emotions on its sleeve. That level of honesty definitely contributes to how corny it can be, which would definitely be off putting to westerners and today’s irony-poisoned population. But I think we need more unapologetic stories like that now more than ever.
We need stuff to remind us what it means to feel things instead of being numb to everything.
This isn’t an April Fools post. I don’t have a large enough following to do stuff like that, and besides, as an American I feel like we’re in no place to be making jokes when the country elected a literal clown for office.
So on March 22nd I hosted my first ever panel at RIT’s Tora-Con. It was extremely successful despite being my first panel, and my wife recorded the whole thing and I’m gonna upload it to my youtube channel soon.
Not exactly sure when though cuz I’ve been checked out since then. I had to spend all of February and March preparing for the con and making sure the beta for Blade Busters was complete in time. I debuted the project at the end of my panel and the audience seemed genuinely interested in it, but I’m kinda scared to see if it has gotten any reviews yet on Itch.
It’s always scary getting your stuff reviewed cuz your ego and pride are going to be inevitably damaged, but for me an even more devastating outcome is finding out that no one tried it at all. Maybe that’s what languishing in obscurity for so long does to ya. In person everyone seems so excited to read my stuff, but then they never engage with it. Then I’m stuck wondering if they were just lying to my face, or (the more likely option) that something else caught their attention and my stuff didn’t leave a strong enough impression that they couldn't remember to check it out.
I can’t get too mad at people for that, because I’m guilty of it myself. I follow Lute & Hazel’s youtube channel, both are musicians and both I keep meaning to check out their stuff on spotify, but life is so busy that I keep forgetting to do so. I'm probably gonna forget again by the time I finish typing this!
So as a consumer, I get it. But as an artist, it doesn’t make it hurt less, because it fills me with this existential dread that no matter how hard I try, I’m unable to break through the noise.
Maybe these thoughts are why I’ve been procrastinating on checking the numbers for the Zelda RPG. When I announced it, it didn’t get nearly as big of a reception as the Metroid RPG. Which was confusing, Zelda has such a larger fandom than metroid, it should’ve attracted more attention. So I’m gonna hold off on working on the final version for a little bit longer, gonna try to make another push for it so I can get more people to gather more data for me. Once I have equal to, or more, playtest responses as the Metroid RPG, I’ll feel secure enough in beginning full development.
But in the meantime, I was supposed to take the rest of March off, but because I can NEVER stand still, (and I needed to distract myself from the decaying state of my country) I threw myself at ANOTHER gamebook project. Yes, I know, I need to stop doing this- BUT I CAN’T HELP IT! This is unlike all the other gamebooks I’ve developed so far, and it has lit a fire under me that I haven’t experienced since the Metroid RPG.
It’s gameplay is inspired by Custom Robo, and is also about giant robots (Which is crazy, cuz after 3 months of having nothing but mechs on my mind, I thought I’d get sick of it and moved on to my next hyper-fixation, but that hasn’t happened yet so Imma ride it out for as long as possible.) other than that I won’t say more about it.
I’m already close to having a playable demo out, and this time I’m gonna take the plunge and start recruiting local playtesters. My local library hosts board game nights for kids, and since this game is aimed at middle-schoolers and older, I’m gonna ask them if I can host nights for my game so they can playtest them. It’s a huge step out of my comfort zone, but the confidence boost I got from my panel is finally motivating me forward.
Once the demo is finalized, I’ll shift back to working on the Zelda RPG and getting that done as my Q2 release, alongside a video promoting Blade Busters.
That’s about everything. It’s my day off and my kid is in school. My wife tells me I should relax, but I can’t rest until the demo is done. Only then will I go back to playing Xenoblade Chronicles X. 35 hours into that game and only now did I finally unlock the fucking Skells.
I tried to be a good boy and play patiently through the early game, but by the time I reached chapter 5 I couldn’t take it anymore! I did exactly the same as 10 years ago and rushed the rest of the way to get the fucking things! But now that I have my precious giant robots I can finally chill and slow down on the game and play it as intended. It's one of those games where the side content is far better than the main story.
Elonyx
NOVEMBER 2025 UPDATE
FINAL UPDATE OF THE YEAR
I’m going to make this the last progress post for the year, as I feel like December is not going to have much happening. Holiday chaos and depression kinda takes up all that time and energy.
For November, the final month in my window to release something within the fall quarter, I actually did manage to release something; In my excitement for Kirby Air Riders I managed to make a video about it in only a week. I was really proud of the turnaround and the quality of the video. Unfortunately it got sent to the shadow realm by the algorithm. So far it’s done worse than my Mecha Break videos, and I don’t understand how that happened.
It was so crushing and I don’t have any confidence in youtube as a platform for video posting anymore. The whole experience just compounded my despair about being trapped in obscurity. I’m growing more and more resentful of the people saying that we should just “create for the sake of creating” because that’s always being said by people who already have an audience, even if it’s a small one.
But the thing about art is that it’s meant to be shared. I don’t just create for the sake of creating, I create so I can share my messages to the world. Art is a form of communication with others, I want to have a dialogue and conversation with people, I want to interact with people in my comment sections, I want to have debates about the grand Ideas I propose, more than the act of completing something, audience engagement is the most rewarding aspect of creating.
Ask any actor or musician or stand-up comedian or gymnast. Do you think any of those mediums would be satisfying if people were just performing in front of a wall? If my stuff is unable to find an audience, one of the biggest motivators of creating art, then how am I not supposed to let that feel discouraging? And I don’t need to be a million view channel or be world famous, I would be fine with a small niche audience as long as I feel like I’m being heard.
But I don’t feel like I’m being heard, and it’s a problem I am no closer to finding a solution for in the 8 years I’ve been pursuing art as a career.
Guess that's also why I feel so… under-achieved this year. My goal this year was to throw as many things at the wall to find out what sticks. I couldn’t complete any comics, I couldn’t finish the Zelda RPG, I tried Youtube for a bit and that is clearly a dead-end given my time and resources, I haven’t found an avenue of success yet.
At this point I only have one wish in the world; a sign. More than anything I want a clear sign of what I need to do to get closer to my dreams.
However, to prevent this year from ending as a total bummer, there are some upsides.
For one, I did achieve my baseline goal of releasing SOMETHING every quarter this year so… main quest accomplished I guess.
My mental health has continued to improve, even if ever so slightly. The complete democrat sweep at the beginning of November did so much to ease my existential dread. All year I’ve been in turmoil over the fact that I’m stuck on a planet going to hell and filled with people who won't do anything to stop it. But seeing such overwhelming support for the opposition against the fascist party, it has finally given me tangible hope that people are in fact paying attention and willing to do something about it.
I’m not as anxious about the future anymore cuz at least I have the comfort in knowing that there’s a majority out there who aren’t taking it anymore either and are going to do something if things continue to decline. I’m still scared shitless mind you, but at least I have a semblance of hope now which relieves some of the psychological burden.
We also got a new dog in the family, an 8 week old puppy. He’s a little bastard but he’s also the most precious baby ever and has predictably attached to me, even though I didn’t do much. Maybe because we’re the only males in the household and bros gotta stick together.
But it is true what they say, pets do improve mental health. Although it would be even better once he’s potty trained and I don’t have to keep cleaning up after him. Despite all my doom and gloom I often post on here, I try to be mindful of the things I do have. I still have a happy marriage with a wonderful wife who supports my efforts no matter what. I have a beautiful and healthy daughter, I have a mother that also supports me, I get along with most of my wife’s family, and we have a roof over our heads.
That’s certainly more than others have right now, and if it weren’t for them I wouldn’t keep going on this journey. I certainly wouldn’t be stable, probably would’ve gone super mario bros by now if I hadn’t met my wife.
I’m going to take it easy on myself this December. Gonna continue to enjoy Kirby Air Riders, rest where I can, write when I’m able to, and try to be kind to myself so I can do better next year.
I hope everyone reading this can have a holiday where they are able to do the same. If you can’t because of the things that have happened to you or are happening; it’s ok to feel the way that you do. Shit sucks right now. But there’s something we all can do to make it better. Saying you had enough is step one. Finding others who feel that way is step 2. Step 3 is something we’ll discover together in the coming year(s), but if you need some ideas right now, looking back at history would be a good starting point.
~a very somber yet reflective Eli
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Elonyx
It might be tricky drawing like this, but we gonna go for it!
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Elonyx
OCTOBER 2025 UPDATE
Welp, got some bad news bears. I wasn’t able to finish the Zelda RPG in time before Age of Imprisonment. My heart just isn’t in the project right now so I decided to put the whole thing on hold. I’m going to aim for a 2026 release now, but specifically when I can’t say, as I think I need some distance from the project in order to get back into it.
I think part of the burnout is the stress I’ve been feeling this month, which really sucks cuz October is usually my favorite month and halloween is my favorite holiday, but I couldn’t enjoy any of it because of the EVERYTHING.
However, I’ve taken some steps to address my mental health. I got myself a new doctor, one that’s closer to me and I finally got a refill on my anti-depressants. The past week there has been a positive difference, but I still feel so burnt out creatively it’s been difficult to get myself to work on anything. So when I get in these slumps I go back to working on my website, which has seen a massive overhaul visually.
I want my website to feel like something from the early internet, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I also uploaded more of my material on there including the final chapter of Mighty Machine Breaks the Lockdown and the first 3 parts of Garage Mechs.
I’ve also been writing a lot of non fiction. Seeing such turmoil in the world I’ve been thinking alot about morality and how we need a different take on what moral behavior and ideology should be, since the framework of ‘good vs evil’ has done nothing but be counter productive. The problem with binary morality, as in labeling everything as either good or bad and the bad needs to be purged at all costs, is that it makes it too easy for individuals to see themselves as the good guys and blind themselves from all the bad they’re doing.
So I’ve been doing a lot of philosophical writing in order to crystalize a new system of morality, one that I want to teach my daughter to better equip her for the broken world she’s inheriting. You may start to see this theming in all of my new works going forward from this point on, as I believe stories are the ultimate way of transmitting ideas.
I don’t know what I’m going to do for the remainder of the year. Gonna keep play-testing the mech SRPG, gonna count down the days until Kirby Air Riders, maybe work on another youtube video, idk man.
I wish I had some kind of sign to tell me what it is I should be prioritizing, that would help my motivation so much, direction on what is going to be the thing that's gonna grab my big break...
~A very burnt out Eli.
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Elonyx
SEPTEMBER 2025 UPDATE
So some good news and some bad news and worse news.
The worst news is that it’s been a whole year and the orange goblin still isn’t fucking dead yet and his continued presence means my mental condition worsens everyday.
Bad news is that progress on the Zelda RPG is still at an absolute crawl. It’s only now fully dawned on me that I had bitten off way more than I could chew with this project. This was a problem I routinely faced with previous projects, including comics, and yet somehow I can’t learn my fucking lesson. I feel so discouraged with the amount of work that still needs to be done.
I think most of my anguish is coming from the fact that I still have descriptors for the 2nd dungeon that aren’t done, and I have completely tapped out of things to say and add to the game’s world. Then I still have to write out all the endings, boss dialogue, NPC’s in the main hub area that I still haven't written, and after all of that is done there’s the extremely tedious process of organizing all those pages together.
A 3 dungeon gamebook turns out to be too much for me to handle on my own. The Metroid RPG was so easy to make cuz it was only 1 dungeon. The Demo of the Zelda RPG was easy to make cuz that was also one dungeon, and there’s still the Mecha RPG gamebook that has also been shelved all year yet 80% done cuz that was also just 1 dungeon.
I will never make a gamebook this large ever again once this is done, IF it ever gets done.
On the good news side, I had my first play test of the Mecha SRPG done last night, and it was an absolute success! So far it’s hitting all my goals and I learned enough to make some needed tweaks, just need a couple more play-test sessions and hopefully a dedicated group that I can conduct more thorough tests with.
That’s the problem with reaching burnout with a project, not only does progress drag because of the low energy you’re able to put into it, but you also keep easily getting distracted by other things that have become more interesting to you. It’s a problem I have struggled all my life and still haven’t found a solution for.
This fact makes me feel like such a failure. So much is going on in the country right now and it feels like I’m not doing enough to contribute, all I’m doing is wasting my time with meaningless games that I’m not sure anyone’s even going to care about…
It will be a complete miracle if I get the Zelda RPG done before November like I intended. If it does, Amazing! If not… I honestly don’t know.
But when it comes to the Mecha-SRPG I’ll keep providing updates as the project develops.
~A very discouraged yet persistent Eli
2 months ago | [YT] | 0
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Elonyx
AUGUST 2025 UPDATE (YOUTUBE VERSION)
TLDR: I’m not making Mecha Break Content anymore. Why? Read below.
I don’t know who will see this, or who will care, but just in case there’s even 1 person out there who discovered me through my Mecha Break Videos, I want to give them the generosity and courtesy of being transparent about the content they came here for. Any one who has a following owes that to their audience regardless of how small it is.
Since Mecha Break came out I was on a roll with releasing weekly videos. It has been the most video material I’ve released consistently ever in my life, and the initial plan was to keep doing it. However, the “What to loot” video has been my only successful video. Despite me using that video as a way to funnel people to my other content, it has done nothing to boost the rest of the videos.
Ever since the “Mecha Break Isn’t Dead” video, the viewership has completely tanked, and each video performed worse than the last. I wanted to stick to a weekly schedule because I was under the impression that the more videos I pumped out at a consistent basis, the more it would be pushed by the algorithm. Evidently that didn’t turn out to be the case at all.
It was a struggle to keep up with a weekly upload schedule, and it was taking away time I wanted to spend on other things. The truth is, I don’t actually want to be a youtuber. I follow a lot of youtubers, most of them doing this full time, and I see first hand how this career practically destroys them mentally, and how in spite of all the effort, many of them still struggle to make ends meet. All in the name of compromising their art and vision because youtube is more concerned about being a sanitized corporation now more than ever.
It’s not a life I want to live, it’s a life I can’t pursue because I have a family that I can’t take care of or give enough attention to if I tried to be a youtuber. All this channel will ever be is a strictly hobby space, and occasionally a place I can promote whatever my latest project or product is. But it will never be my medium of choice.
Obviously if doing Mecha Break content was pulling in numbers then maybe I could make youtube a side hustle to pay the bills instead of my current day-time job. But it’s clear now that’s not going to happen. I don’t know if it’s because the content itself is subpar, or Mecha Break really is dying and it’s not going to pull in a large enough audience to make channels like mine a worthwhile niche to carve into.
I don’t want the game to die, but even I can’t deny the declining numbers, and I myself haven’t played in ages. Not because I stopped having fun, but I had to spend my time making videos about it instead of playing it. But Nowadays my days are so busy and stressful that I don’t have the energy to play anymore. I’m not a teen or in my early 20’s anymore, I just don’t have the energy, time and motivation to keep up with a fast paced competitive game.
And I’ll be honest, it’s hard to not let all the doomers get to ya. I had to stop following the mechabreak subreddit cuz everyday there was another post about how the game is dying, and it really does become an obnoxious bummer after awhile. As an American I’m struggling to fight for so many things right now, I don’t have it in me to add another struggle on the list, especially when it’s something so inconsequential as a videogame from a foreign country that I realistically won't have a big impact on.
I could go on, just bearing all my emotions, but I think I made my point clear. I don’t plan on making any more Mecha Break content in the near future, not even more ‘State of Break’ episodes like I initially promised. I’m not a youtuber, I’m an artist and storyteller. I started making Meche Break vids cuz the game excited me, but now there’s another project that’s excited me, and I’ll share more details on that in my monthly reports on all the other platforms I post to.
To the person or people that subscribed to my channel or discovered my stuff because of my Mecha Break content, I’m sorry I’m unable to deliver the kind of entertainment you were seeking. But it’s my firm belief that an artist can’t perform if their heart isn’t into it, and providing a subpar performance to your audience is a form of robbery. They are giving you time and/or money because they trusted you to give them a good time, and being unable to meet that promise but demanding that time and money anyways is dishonest.
Whatever you may think of me, I hope to at least demonstrate honesty to you and to myself. But I wont stop making videos entirely, and if you’re at all curious as to what I’ve been working on instead and what I’ll be doing from here on out, read up my blog on my website, elonyx-media.net
~A very tired & sad Eli.
3 months ago | [YT] | 2
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Elonyx
JULY 2025 UPDATE
Hmmmm…. I don’t know how to feel about this month. I feel like I’m supposed to feel proud, accomplished and productive, cuz I managed to release SIX youtube videos in one month, and I’ve made significant headway on the Zelda RPG. Almost all of the monster illustrations and UI stuff is done.
However, It’s not as much as I was hoping for. I’ve been able to get at least one drawing done a day while at my day job, but some days are busier than others so sometimes I don’t get any drawings done. As a result, I still feel behind on the development of the Zelda RPG. I wanted to get the game done by the end of August, but at the pace of things moving right now, that’s likely not going to happen.
I’m gonna have to settle with the Zelda RPG being released in the fall instead of August, and that really stings because I saw August as the best possible time to release the game. There’s a drought of meaningful Zelda content this year, so if there was any chance for the game to catch fire within the fandom, it would’ve been now before the new muso game in the fall.
In its place I’m treating the revamped activity of this youtube channel as the summer release for quarter 3. I want to see how far this channel can go on the format and work cycle I’m currently working under. My plan right now is to keep up the momentum and get at least 1 video out a week, for the rest of the remaining year.
So that’s 23 videos… which now that I count it all out feels a bit more daunting than I was expecting, so at a minimum I’m gonna aim for 12. I’m gonna treat this as a practice run: To see if I really have what it takes to create an audience on youtube which I can then use to get attention for all my other projects.
This year has been me just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Games, re-relasing my comic backlog on reddit, and now youtube. If I can’t keep up the upload rate or get burned out before the end of the year, then I’ll know that this isn’t the avenue for me and will go back to what this channel used to be: The occasional dumping ground of random video ideas.
It’s a lot, I know, but for some reason I tend to perform better when under pressure and have multiple things going on at once. But then again maybe I’m already over working myself. Maybe the reason I still feel empty at the end of this month is because I’m still depressed about the state of… everything.
So I’m trying to distract myself by inundating myself with projects. Speaking of distractions, one of the things I’ve been doing to stave off the darkness is getting back into F1 now that the summer break is over.
I’ve also been watching abuncha F1 shows and movies. Right now I’m going through Netflix’s Senna. So far it’s good but I hope Netflix had the balls to address the fact that the man was a pedo and that is not ok. NO I DON’T CARE IF THEY BROKE UP 3 YEARS LATER, THE MARRIAGE SHOULD HAVE NEVER HAPPENED TO BEGIN WITH!!
I hate how we have decayed as a society so much that we have to clarify why pedophilia is wrong.
I hate this country. I hate the people in it. I want the aliens to take me home.
~Eli
4 months ago | [YT] | 1
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Elonyx
JUNE 2025
Man… I was really feeling myself up last month cuz I got so much done. Then the first week of June happened.
So first, my mother-in-law had to get hospitalized ON MY BIRTHDAY! (She’s fine now) Then on the following Tuesday my phone died. Just- POOF- Dead. Battery was half full, no indication that something was wrong, no notifications, no notices, no updates, just POOF! Screen went black, and no matter how long I charged it, no matter what charger or cord I used, it would not wake up.
I had no idea a simple electronic tool could be so disruptive to one’s life. We as a society have become so overly dependent on smart devices that losing it is like suddenly being locked out of your own house. I hate this fact. At least I was fortunate enough to have a family member that had an iphone that wasn’t too out of date to give to me. Imagine how devastating it would be to not only lose your smartphone, but also pay a king’s ransom, or sell a kidney, or add ANOTHER monthly bill to buy a new one quickly?
Because I didn’t have access to a phone for several days, and had to spend several more days moving all my stuff back in, I couldn’t clock into my day job for a week. And because of THAT- I MISSED PAY WEEK, so now I have to wait FOUR FUCKING WEEKS to get my check, instead of two!! BiWeekly pay cycles need to be fucking illegal!!
AND I HAD SEVERAL TRAININGS I HAD TO SUDDENLY COMPLETE ON TOP OF ALL THIS SHIT!! AND JUST TODAY AS I’M WRITING THIS< MY DAUGHTER LOST MY GODDAMN CAR KEYS!!
And another consequence of my phone dying, is that I LOST ALL MY WIZARDRY WAIFUS!! My last phone was an android. My new phone is an iPhone. I can’t login and redownload all my save data cuz they were on two completely different store fronts! AND I CANT TRANSFER THE DATA CUZ MY PHONE WONT TURN ON SO i CAN’T GET A CODE TO TRANSFER MY ACCOUNT, MY WAIFUS ARE BEING HELD HOSTAGE BY THE PLANNED-OBSOLESCENCE DEMONS CONJURED BY TECH CORPORATIONS!!
I can’t rescue them until I can get my phone to a repair shop to get the data extracted, WHICH I CANT DO CUZ I GOT NO FUCKING MONEY!!!
So without my waifus to keep me occupied, I ended up back on reddit. And OF COURSE this HAD TO BE THE MONTH shit goes down in the middle east, and now my feed if filled with people declaring that WW3 is about to start. Which, in all honestly is not whats going to happen (people have been saying that every time the east lights up since 2006) but, ya know- STILL NOT A GOOD VIBE FOR MY DEPRESSED ASS!!
So basically, I got NOTHING done all month!
…well except Blade Busters. The updated pdf is now available on Itch.io. I have achieved my Q2 quota, so at least I could comfortably crash out for the rest of the month. Otherwise, this is the top contender of my worst month of the worst year of being an American. Yet, considering everything else that’s happening in this country, I’m hoping that this is the worst it gets for my personal life.
If anything, I’ve had the release of Mecha Break to look forward to. I’m gonna spend the first week playing that after suffering from mecha-withdrawels for four months. After I get that outta my system, it’s all Zelda RPG, all day* everyday* until it’s complete.
(*or rather, for as many hours as a full-time working parent can be provided.)
But until then, I’m gonna lie down now. fml
~A very tired Eli
5 months ago | [YT] | 0
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Elonyx
MAY 2025 UPDATE
Yes I know It’s almost the end of June. I wrote this in the first week of June, then SO MUCH LIFE HAPPENED. I’ll go into more detail in the June update, which at this rate is probably gonna be next week. Now, let's go back in time-
For once I feel like I’ve had a moderately successful month in terms of productivity. I’ve made A TON of progress on the Zelda RPG, including getting all the text for one of the dungeons complete and the 2nd dungeon 60% complete. I was hoping to get the text for both dungeons complete before the end of the month so I could focus on the minuscule NPC dialogue and tutorial section, but I had a belated start this month due to hiding my notes from myself.
I have a Nintendo-esque approach when it comes to game design, in that I design the mechanics first, then I write the story around what I’ve built to ensure mechanics and story enhance each other. In this case, I had already plotted out the maps of all the dungeons back in January or even November, and then locked them up when I shifted focus towards other things.
I couldn’t start writing until I found the maps and see how I arranged all the rooms so I could go- “ok these rooms are where the Moving Mangrove forest will go, and this is where the ship will go” so that the placement of all the locations and set pieces connected to each other in a logically within the world.
After that, I decided to take Yahtzee Crowshaws advise when it comes to maintaining drive on a project- write at least 1 page a day. Or in my case, write down at least 5 rooms a day. Each room descriptor is 1 paragraph at most, so 5 paragraphs should roughly equal one page.
I can attest that it does work, but it doesn’t account for the fact that sometimes life happens. The last few days of May I broke the streak because stuff just kept happening and I didn’t have the availability to write at all.
After this weekend I’m gonna try and get back into it. I feel the pull of mecha again so my goal for June is to finalize Blade Busters and get it out as a feature complete product so that I have something to show for a Q2 release. Then I’m spending all of summer prioritizing The Zelda RPG. This is the perfect window of opportunity for something like it to come out; there’s no new major Zelda title coming out this year so this is the only chance I have in the foreseeable future for this project catching on, both within the fandom and out of it.
If I can get the Zelda RPG done and Blade Busters complete, I will feel like I had accomplished enough this year. Then I can focus on creating anything else at my own pace, like all those video projects I’ve wanted to do, or the other games I’ve already started.
In terms of mental health, May has also been really good for me, mostly because I found something else to do on my phone instead of doom-scrolling on reddit. Funnily enough, that alternative is- of all things- a mobile gatcha game….
Yes, I’m firmly aware of the irony of trading one addiction for another, except this isn’t just another waifu slot machine, this is an actual video game first that is perfectly playable without paying into it at all. The game is Wizardry Variants Daphne, the newest entry in the ancient yet incredibly influential DRPG series, Wizardry.
Now this was going to be part of the update where I gushed about Wizardry, how good it is and how it got my game-designer brain going- But then life happened. How much life? Tune in next month to find out.
~Eli
5 months ago | [YT] | 0
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Elonyx
APRIL 2025 UPDATE
I don’t know how to start this month’s recap. I’m still half asleep from an unexpected nap I took because my daughter threw up in the middle of the night, two nights in a row. Now whatever stomach virus she got, I got, because she learned that sharing is caring except she shares the things I DON'T want.
So I completed the prototype for the other gamebook project I talked about last time, yet it was only today did I finally gather the balls needed to ask my local library for playtesters. My introverted ass kept putting it off and off until my self-inflicted deadline of… the end of the month.
After I finished the prototype… I kinda languished for the rest of the month. It’s been hard to stay on track and many things have been piling on my stress. It all culminated this week where the amount of stress I’ve been experiencing has gotten me sick and my wife forced me to be bedridden yesterday.
I think I’m going to double down on unplugging from the internet for the rest of the month. Really try to double down and focus on getting stuff done. I need to get that presentation uploaded, I need to get the blade busters video done, and I’m gonna work hard to get the Zelda RPG done by the end of June. If I can get the Zelda RPG done and the other gamebook project done by September, I’ll consider that a successful year in terms of productivity and releases.
That’s all I got this month. I know it’s not as detailed as I usually am, but I guess that speaks more on how tired I am. This month I’ve been feeling so burnt out on life in general. My family keeps me breathing at least, and there’s… SOMETHING that keeps me nudging forward on all these artistic endeavors. I don’t know what that thing is, motivation doesn’t feel right cuz I’m too depressed to feel determination.
In Xenoblade news, I got the flight module. I don’t know if my brain had been so fried from the stress, but using the flight module for the first time, witnessing my skell fly seamlessly from NLA to Primordia with no loading screens, flying around with such an overwhelming sense of freedom while cheesy music about letting go of your sorrows-
It brought tears to my eyes. After I landed, I didn’t sob, my eyes just watered uncontrollably for at least an hour cuz I was just so overwhelmed with this sense of joy and peace. It sounds so sentimental I know, but for all of Xenoblade X’s faults, especially the shitty music, it’s such a sincere game that’s not afraid to wear its emotions on its sleeve. That level of honesty definitely contributes to how corny it can be, which would definitely be off putting to westerners and today’s irony-poisoned population. But I think we need more unapologetic stories like that now more than ever.
We need stuff to remind us what it means to feel things instead of being numb to everything.
~Eli
7 months ago | [YT] | 0
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Elonyx
MARCH 2025 UPDATE
~NEW RELEASE! BLADE BUSTERS (Beta) NOW LIVE! ~
www.elonyxmedia.net/blade-busters
This isn’t an April Fools post. I don’t have a large enough following to do stuff like that, and besides, as an American I feel like we’re in no place to be making jokes when the country elected a literal clown for office.
So on March 22nd I hosted my first ever panel at RIT’s Tora-Con. It was extremely successful despite being my first panel, and my wife recorded the whole thing and I’m gonna upload it to my youtube channel soon.
Not exactly sure when though cuz I’ve been checked out since then. I had to spend all of February and March preparing for the con and making sure the beta for Blade Busters was complete in time. I debuted the project at the end of my panel and the audience seemed genuinely interested in it, but I’m kinda scared to see if it has gotten any reviews yet on Itch.
It’s always scary getting your stuff reviewed cuz your ego and pride are going to be inevitably damaged, but for me an even more devastating outcome is finding out that no one tried it at all. Maybe that’s what languishing in obscurity for so long does to ya. In person everyone seems so excited to read my stuff, but then they never engage with it. Then I’m stuck wondering if they were just lying to my face, or (the more likely option) that something else caught their attention and my stuff didn’t leave a strong enough impression that they couldn't remember to check it out.
I can’t get too mad at people for that, because I’m guilty of it myself. I follow Lute & Hazel’s youtube channel, both are musicians and both I keep meaning to check out their stuff on spotify, but life is so busy that I keep forgetting to do so. I'm probably gonna forget again by the time I finish typing this!
So as a consumer, I get it. But as an artist, it doesn’t make it hurt less, because it fills me with this existential dread that no matter how hard I try, I’m unable to break through the noise.
Maybe these thoughts are why I’ve been procrastinating on checking the numbers for the Zelda RPG. When I announced it, it didn’t get nearly as big of a reception as the Metroid RPG. Which was confusing, Zelda has such a larger fandom than metroid, it should’ve attracted more attention. So I’m gonna hold off on working on the final version for a little bit longer, gonna try to make another push for it so I can get more people to gather more data for me. Once I have equal to, or more, playtest responses as the Metroid RPG, I’ll feel secure enough in beginning full development.
But in the meantime, I was supposed to take the rest of March off, but because I can NEVER stand still, (and I needed to distract myself from the decaying state of my country) I threw myself at ANOTHER gamebook project. Yes, I know, I need to stop doing this- BUT I CAN’T HELP IT! This is unlike all the other gamebooks I’ve developed so far, and it has lit a fire under me that I haven’t experienced since the Metroid RPG.
It’s gameplay is inspired by Custom Robo, and is also about giant robots (Which is crazy, cuz after 3 months of having nothing but mechs on my mind, I thought I’d get sick of it and moved on to my next hyper-fixation, but that hasn’t happened yet so Imma ride it out for as long as possible.) other than that I won’t say more about it.
I’m already close to having a playable demo out, and this time I’m gonna take the plunge and start recruiting local playtesters. My local library hosts board game nights for kids, and since this game is aimed at middle-schoolers and older, I’m gonna ask them if I can host nights for my game so they can playtest them. It’s a huge step out of my comfort zone, but the confidence boost I got from my panel is finally motivating me forward.
Once the demo is finalized, I’ll shift back to working on the Zelda RPG and getting that done as my Q2 release, alongside a video promoting Blade Busters.
That’s about everything. It’s my day off and my kid is in school. My wife tells me I should relax, but I can’t rest until the demo is done. Only then will I go back to playing Xenoblade Chronicles X. 35 hours into that game and only now did I finally unlock the fucking Skells.
I tried to be a good boy and play patiently through the early game, but by the time I reached chapter 5 I couldn’t take it anymore! I did exactly the same as 10 years ago and rushed the rest of the way to get the fucking things! But now that I have my precious giant robots I can finally chill and slow down on the game and play it as intended. It's one of those games where the side content is far better than the main story.
~Eli
8 months ago | [YT] | 0
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