Einträge unter Kategorie „Mukai Project‟

Hello, Popfan here!

For those of you who have been following me on Bluesky (or even keep up with this blog without following me on social media, as unlikely as your existence may be), you may have been seeing me talk about a “website relaunch” from time to time, especially more recently so over the past two months. Well, needless to say, by the time you’re reading this, you’re looking at the fruits of my hard labor already!

It’s been a long year-and-a-half-plus, too. I’d originally gotten started on it way back in October 2023, primarily wanting to rewrite all the code to make it more maintainable, but also improve the frontend in various ways. Naively optimistic as I was, I thought I’d get the whole thing done in a couple months, but even aside from the fact that I no longer have all the time in the world nor the best mental health, rebuilding a project of this caliber from complete scratch in a way that adheres to my newfound professional standards is... a pretty damn involved process, actually.

For a refresher on what that’s been like, see the posts under the “Website” category. Picking up from the tail end of 2024, I’d spent a few days in January doing a bit of necessary busywork in order to lay the groundwork for being able to re-implement the blog at all: Since it has a completely different URL structure wherein a given page template corresponds to many different URLs, I needed to modularize the code for checking URL integrity and getting the correct page templates.

Once that was done, I did... a whole lot of nothing for several months. I don’t entirely remember what happened, but getting sick with the flu for the entire second half of February didn’t help, nor did the anxiety attacks I’d started suffering from as a consequence of that. My job performance was likewise suffering as a result of the pressure I’d put on myself, and, all in all, it took about two months to work through all that and get myself back on track.

So late April was when I decided to resume working on the website. By that point, everything was done except for the blog, and while I could find a lot of code (PHP and CSS alike) that I wanted to refactor, I told myself I’d just save it for after everything is done and live, and just treat the blog as independently from the rest of the site as I could. I eased myself into it by doing a microscopic amount of work each day — we’re talking as little as a single CSS rule per day. After all, better to get a tiny amount done every day than no amount for weeks or months on end.

Come early May, though, and things began to snowball hard. Watching things come together little by little did wonders for my motivation, resulting in me spending the weekends just locking in and pushing dozens of commits — sometimes even that many in just a single day! I was riding a wave of euphoria the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Certainly not since the year has started, at least. My momentum was back in full swing, I was making mad progress on one of my passion projects, the finish line was starting to become visible on the horizon... life was good, and that motivation and ability to perform also carried over to my job, further bolstering my confidence and self-esteem.

Of course, as is the case with strong emotions in general, good or bad, they may feel like they’re going to last forever at the time, but they do come to an end eventually. It was quite sobering when I started feeling myself going from “absolutely fantastic” to just “pretty good”, but fortunately I didn’t let that stop me. And why should I have? Things were still going extremely well, and tangible progress was being made on all fronts. After months of downtime and feeling like complete dogshit, I wasn’t about to just let all of that go again, especially with how lengthy a process it is for me to build up momentum in the first place.

In any case, last Tuesday was the day I’d finally completely reconstructed the blog. The days that followed were dedicated to miscellaneous cleanup work in order to prepare for the eventual rollout that upcoming weekend. Of course, like I said, all of that is done and ready by the time you’re reading this, so let’s quickly go through the changes and additions that are relevant to you as a visitor.

Appearance: The overall identity is still the same, but text and spacing have been made a little bit larger overall, and colors were adjusted slightly to better conform to WCAG contrast requirements. It’s still not perfect, particularly with the background gradient for the headings, but I’m already in the concept phase for how to make it work better while keeping the visual changes as minimal as possible.

Accessibility: Special care was taken to ensure that every page of the website is fully operable with a keyboard, and users of screen readers should theoretically also be catered to. Again, it’s not 100% perfect yet (non-blog pages in particular might still be missing some vital components), but it can’t be any worse than the previous version, at least.

Music page: Embeds for Bandcamp, Soundcloud and YouTube have been removed because they’re a privacy nightmare. Instead, albums now show a static track list, their price, and a link to their Bandcamp page. The other playlists have instead been replaced with a custom audio player built entirely from scratch. I actually wanted to make one of those during the last overhaul back in 2021, but had ultimately decided against it because my skills with Javascript just weren’t up to snuff at the time. They are now, though, and while the code is still kind of a mess, I hope it all works.

Games: The games overview itself is now a list view because a grid view simply didn’t make that much sense with a library this small. Means I can show a bit more info, too; long-time fans may see similarities to the pre-2021 design. The pages for each individual game now have overhauled galleries, courtesy of an external Javascript library I fell in love with at my job, and embedded videos now have to be clicked before the YouTube iframe gets loaded in.

Blog: Mostly still the same as before, although I still have plans for the future, primarily revolving around adding pagination and a search bar. Those will become increasingly important the more posts I end up writing, since otherwise we’ll end up with massive pages. Other than that, I’d also like future blog posts to have more types of content than just plain text. Subheadings and images, for example.

There are new pages planned, too, of course. For instance, a page dedicated to links, or one for guidelines... though I’m also still thinking of writing up a sort of documentary on Endless Blue, given the significance of that game idea to what was once known as Team Gaijin Alex. I’m not the type to just forget about my roots, after all.

So... now that the website has been relaunched, what comes next?

Well, first things first, a much-needed break. Which I know means losing all my momentum and having to start slowly building it back up all over again, but as you may remember, I actually got sick very shortly after finishing and releasing the update to my Sokoban clone last year. I’d like to avoid a repeat of that if I can help it, especially with how hard I ended up tunnel-visioning on this project towards the end.

After my break, though? My idea was that I’d work on my album next, followed by starting development of Mukai 2 in earnest. However, I took a lot longer with the website than I was expecting, and part of me would like to have Mukai 2 done in time for the 10th anniversary if that is at all possible (it’s extremely unlikely, if we’re gonna be realistic, but a guy can dream). I’m still not entirely sure how I’m gonna go about it, but I was thinking of doing both simultaneously, actually.

I know, I know, stretching myself too thin is a bad thing, but hear me out:

Work on the album would require getting my feet wet with writing music again, something I haven’t done in over a year (seriously, I haven’t written a single thing for all of 2024, nor 2025 up to this point). Game development, on the other hand, spans several disciplines. For instance, I’ve actually been making a lot of progress on the game’s script, only missing a few endings by this point. I’ll also need new assets: graphics, music, sound effects.

So what I could do is prioritize writing music for the album, but also make sprites and other graphics for the game on the side, such as if/when I’m starting to feel a creative block coming on or I’m otherwise too frustrated to make any headway with composing. That way, I’m still making the best out of my time, and by the time the album’s up for sale on Bandcamp, I might have already amassed enough sprites and other assets that I can start actually putting it all together without needing to rely on placeholder graphics that fail to give me a good feel of how the final product would end up looking.

Whether that’ll actually work out for me remains to be seen, but after how long the game has effectively been dead in the water, I just want to give myself any head start I can get, and the only reason the album is still a priority is because a) it’s the smaller project of the two, and b) it’ll be a good opportunity to experiment with the direction I’ve been wanting to take my style into.

But that would be it from me for now. Once again, thank you guys so much for your patience and support. You’re probably not getting that much out of the new website, but I hope you understand that it was something I simply had to get out of the way for my own sake in order to make it possible for me to even continue maintaining it properly.

Here’s hoping that I’ll be able to deliver more of what I’m good at soon.

Another year coming to an end... Hopefully 2024 has been treating you guys well enough. In my case, it was definitely quite eventful, even if you might not be able to tell from my activity. So let me walk you through the things that have (or haven’t) happened, and what my plans for 2025 are.

Things actually started off pretty strong, what with me releasing the update to my Sokoban clone in early February! If you haven’t checked it out yet, I’d wholeheartedly recommend that you do so, if only for all the secrets and easter eggs I’ve crammed into it.

Unfortunately, I must have given it 110% for a little too long, since, shortly after releasing the aforementioned update, I started getting sick a lot. At the worst of it, I ended up out of commission for a couple days at a time every other week, usually on or around the weekends. It was quite the problem for my job, too, since I was missing for so many days. I tried a few different things, like changing my diet or exercise regimen, or even taking antihistamines, but what ultimately helped me get back on track again ended up being daily multivitamin supplements, of all things.

Even to this day, though, my health is kind of a tightrope walk. Granted, it seems to be getting more manageable, but I still need to be careful not to overwork myself, which is easier said than done because I can tunnel-vision so hard that I completely lose sight of my physical and mental needs.

Sickness aside, work on the website relaunch began in earnest in late March this year... and is still ongoing, despite my initial prediction that it’d only take me a few months to complete. Turns out it’s so much more complex than I could’ve ever anticipated, and while there’s little that’s left to do before I can get started on reconstructing the blog, I expect that the blog is going to be a major undertaking unto itself. It’ll probably take me at least another few months.

Also doesn’t help that I’ve had a lot of overall downtime (such as from June to early September, and there was hardly any progress made from mid-October to late December, either), without which a go-live within 2024 might just have been in the cards, but oh well. I have recently (as in, roughly a week ago) started to challenge myself to get at least a little bit of progress done each day, though, even if it’s just two minutes. Hopefully that’ll help get things back on track again... and it does look promising so far, so fingers crossed!

A major highlight of the year was — as acknowledged in the previous blog post — the fact that the 500 million bounty for chain of lucidity was claimed at last, and that, in turn, seems to have snowballed into the genesis of a small but devoted Mukai fandom, which I couldn’t be happier about. Shoutouts to Sins, Errhed, ALePH_D, and PressEtoAscend for being effectively the ambassadors of that one game I made six years ago that’s still waiting for its sequel. Once again, thank you so much for your support, as well as your saintlike patience with the glacial pace of my creative output!

Said small fandom also made me realize another aspect of my brand: my coverage of retro games that have strong emotional significance to me. It was brought to my attention that I have a very personal, passionate, informative, and I suppose humorous way of presenting these games, as exhibited by my gaming blog, my Full Playthroughs series on YouTube (for which I’ve managed to make four new videos this year!), or even the occasional streams for longer-form games, in which I could interact with my watchers directly — or, as was more often the case, have them interact with each other while I was deep in concentration with whatever game I was playing at the time.

What I’m trying to say is that this is something I hope to be able to continue doing, going forward, not least of all because I’ve been told it’s comfort material (and, I mean... even I like rewatching these videos from time to time). Time will tell how I’ll be able to get them slotted into my schedule, but I likely won’t be able to put them out on a regular basis anytime soon.

Other than that, though... well, I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t composed a single track this entire year. I’m hoping that’ll change next year, since I’ve still got an album to finish — it and the website relaunch are the only things still in the way of me starting development on the second Mukai game... which I feel like I really owe to you guys at this point. Unfortunately, perfection can’t be rushed, and neither can “good enough”, especially when you’re suffering from crippling perfectionism the way I am.

That also means that my plans for 2025 haven’t really changed from my plans for this year: Get the website done, then the album, then start development on the game, sprinkling in playthrough videos here and there to maintain at least some semblance of output. My biggest problem is still my lack of efficiency, and this year in particular I’ve felt especially limited by my mental reserves; managing all of this alongside a full-time job still isn’t easy, but this is gonna be my life for at least the next 30-40 years, so I might as well figure out how to make it work for me without constantly burning out in the process.

And with that said, I wish you guys a happy new year. See you back on the road in 2025!

2023 is slowly drawing to a close, and with it the 10th year of Retrograde Road’s existence. A lot has happened in that time — far more than I could feasibly remember off the top of my head. Hell, I’m already struggling to list all the noteworthy things that happened this year.

Relatively speaking, though, not a whole lot actually happened in terms of finished projects. I wasn’t even able to finish my new album before the end of the year, like I was hoping I would. What did happen a lot of, however, was personal growth: Somehow, this was the year where my mental health improved rapidly, and it’s all thanks to the realization that I need to take the initiative in dealing with the things I’m unhappy about. It wouldn’t be appropriate going into too much detail here, but suffice it to say that, had I not given myself that push, I’d still be unemployed and miserable.

Of course, there’s still a lot to work on — my confidence for writing music is still in shambles, and I’ve yet to find the time to hone my drawing skills — but all things considered, I’m a lot more optimistic now than I was around this time last year. I can do all of this, even if it takes time.

So let’s talk about my goals for 2024 instead!

First things first, I definitely still want to get my Sokoban clone done and ready again before all else. I genuinely didn’t think it’d take this long, but it kind of turned into more than just a porting and refactoring project. At this point I’m straight-up adding new content to the game, new features. Christmas festivities may have held me up a bit, but I’m determined to get it all done early next year, preferably within January or February.

After that, it’s time to start doing productivity streams — and with them comes work on other projects, starting with the refactoring/relaunch of this very website. I might even be in a bit of a race against time there, since the blog’s calendar widget bugging out makes me feel like it’s inexplicably falling apart at the seams. (I’ve disabled the widget for the time being, in case you’re wondering.)

Then, once that is done, it’s back to working on my album, full steam ahead. Maybe, with any luck, I can manage a 2024 release, after all, but I don’t want to make any guarantees because never once have I been able to actually stick to a deadline I set for myself.

And then, finally... work on the second Mukai game, after so many years of nothing. It’ll be a true test of everything I’ve learned, and I’m already looking forward to sharing its development with you all. If all goes well, I might get to start working on it in late 2024 or early 2025, but again, nothing to set your watches by.

It’s not much this time around, but that’s all for now. I wish you guys a happy new year, and you’ll be hearing from me no later than late January.

Um ehrlich zu sein: ich hätte das hier um einiges früher geschrieben, wäre es mir nicht in den Sinn gekommen, Wordpress aufzugeben und meinen eigenen Blog zu erstellen. Aber dann wiederum bedeutet die Verzögerung, dass sich so einiges seit Januar ereignet hat — und zwar richtig gute Dinge.

Ende letzten Jahres hatte ich einen Schicksalsschlag, für welchen die Schuld einzig und allein bei mir lag. Am Boden zerstört ist mir dann etwas klargeworden, wonach ich mich schon hätte viel zeitiger richten müssen: Meine Unglücklichkeit mit mir selbst und meinem Leben war lediglich wie mein Gehirn mir signalisieren wollte, dass ich mir Zeit nehmen sollte, zu überlegen, was genau es eigentlich ist, das mich so unzufrieden macht, um dann anschließend aktiv daran zu arbeiten, anstatt in Elend und Selbstmitleid zu versinken.

Sobald ich das kapiert hatte und besser darin wurde, mich selbst zum Handeln zu bewegen, ging es auf einmal ganz schnell bergauf mit mir, und ich fand mich dazu in der Lage, Dinge zu bewerkstelligen, die ich mir nie zugetraut hätte. Jetzt in diesem Moment habe ich ernsthaft den Eindruck, ich erfreue mich meiner besten seelischen Gesundheit seit 2018, wenn nicht sogar 2002. Ein Gefühl von Handlungsfähigkeit zu haben wirkt wahrliche Wunder, was das eigene seelische und psychische Wohlbefinden betrifft.

Und was hab ich bis jetzt mit meiner neugefundenen Stärke so alles gemacht? Einerseits ganz viel Tagebuch geführt, um zu erschließen, was meiner Produktivität hilft und was sie hindert, und anschließend einen Plan entworfen, der für mich funktioniert: Nebst einer täglichen To-Do-Liste mit etwa 3-5 Aufgaben führe ich jetzt auch eine Art Prioritätenliste. Die benutze ich für mittel- bis langfristige Aufgaben, die ich in zweierlei Gruppen unterteile: befristet und unbefristet. Für jede Aufgabe schreibe ich mir detaillierte Notizen auf: was zu erledigen ist, welche Probleme und Stolpersteine sich ergeben könnten, und was mein erster bzw. nächster Schritt sein sollte. Erledigte Aufgaben kommen anschließend in eine dritte Kategorie für ebendiese, markiert mit dem Datum, an welchem ich sie erledigt habe, und es ist ganz schön ermutigend, mit anzusehen, wie diese Kategorie langsam wächst.

Durch diese Art von Selbstorganisation hab ich es auch geschafft, mein Leben selbst einen riesigen Schritt vorwärts zu bringen! Ich hatte endlich wieder den Mut gefunden, Bewerbungen rauszuschicken, und es hat sich ausgezahlt: Nach knapp zwei Jahren ohne Beschäftigung hab ich nun endlich eine Ausbildung! Die mach ich bei einer Webagentur hier in meiner Stadt für drei Jahre, aber meine Übernahmechancen scheinen gut zu stehen, und selbst mein Monatslohn als Azubi sieht nicht schlecht aus. Ich fange nächsten Monat, am 3. Juni, an. Wünscht mir Glück!

Aber reden wir auch ein wenig über meine kreativen Bemühungen. Mein Album, zum Beispiel, welches derzeit etwas weniger als 30% fertig ist. Zwar kann ich keinewegs über die Qualität bis jetzt klagen, aber es wäre mir schon lieber gewesen, weiter zu sein als ich es derzeit bin. Burnout und die Angst vorm Versagen haben mir einen Stein nach dem anderen in den Weg gelegt, und wenn man bedenkt, dass ich ab nächstem Monat 40 Stunden die Woche arbeiten werde, scheint es recht unwahrscheinlich, dass der Release noch dieses Jahr stattfinden wird... zumindest solange mein Arbeitsprozess weiterhin so unbeständig bleibt. Aber ich hab schon andere Probleme in meinem Leben lösen können, also warum nicht auch dieses irgendwann?

Ihr erinnert euch vielleicht auch noch, dass ich im Januar angefangen hatte, mit Figurenskizzen allmählich wieder ins Zeichnen zurückzufinden. Seitdem würde ich sagen hab ich einiges an Fortschritt gemacht: einen Körperteil nach dem anderen bring ich mir allmählich die Anatomie des Menschen näher. Zugegebenermaßen lässt meine Präzision mit dem Stift noch einiges zu Wünschen übrig, aber ich hatte das Glück, einen Mentor zu finden, der ein gutes Auge für Details hat und mich zu motivieren weiß. Vielleicht schaff ich es ja, dieses Jahr hier und da eine Zeichnung fertig zu bekommen. Wir werden sehen.

Manchen von euch wird bestimmt auch mein neuentfachter Eifer für Fremdsprachen aufgefallen sein. Letzten September hatte ich zum Beispiel angefangen, mir Spanisch beizubringen. Ich würde keineswegs sagen, dass ich die Sprache schon fließend beherrsche, aber ich fühle mich zumindest gut genug, um Gespräche darin zu führen. Als Folge dessen hab ich außerdem beschlossen, mir noch andere romanische Sprachen beizubringen, und in diesem Moment wären das Französisch und Portugiesisch. Trotzdem würde ich meine Spanischkenntnisse gerne erweitern, und hoffentlich einen Durchbruch mit meinem Japanisch machen, weil ich den Eindruck hab, schon seit Jahren nicht viel besser darin geworden zu sein. Und wer weiß, was die Zukunft bringt? Vielleicht knie ich mich wieder in Schwedisch und Finnisch rein, oder schau mir eine komplett neue Sprache an. So oder so, der Traum, polyglott zu werden, lebt weiter.

Was andere Pläne betrifft... na ja, ich muss gestehen, dass ich leider noch immer nicht viel Gelegenheit hatte, am zweiten Mukai-Spiel zu arbeiten — ich kann noch immer nicht so gut zeichnen, wie ich es gerne hätte, mein Album hat volle Priorität, was Musik betrifft, und ohne Bild- oder Tonmaterial hat es nicht viel Sinn, mit dem Programmieren anzufangen — aber da gibt es dieses andere Projekt, das ich vielleicht mal in ferner Zukunft realisieren würde.

Als Kind hab ich gerne und viel mit RPG Maker rumhantiert. Mein erstes Spiel hab ich sogar während der 30-tägigen Testphase mit RPG Maker VX fertigentwickelt (auch wenn es ein sehr, sehr schlechtes Spiel geworden ist), und abgesehen von diesem, sowie etlicher anderer Projekte, die ich angefangen und jeweils nach weniger als einer Woche wieder aufgegeben hatte, gab es ein Spiel, das ich tatsächlich ordentlich durchgeplant hatte... Natürlich ist es auch nie ansatzweise fertig geworden, aber selbst nach all diesen Jahren denke ich ab und an noch daran, und ich würde doch gerne etwas daraus machen. Außerdem wollte ich schon immer mal eine RPG-Engine in Game Maker schreiben. Das klingt nach einer interessanten Herausforderung.

Ich würde sagen, das wäre auch schon so ziemlich alles, was sich dieses Jahr bis jetzt ereignet hat. Ich weiß noch, als ich diese Art Einträge alle zwei Wochen verfassen wollte... Zwar glaub ich nicht, dass ich in zwei Wochen genug bewerkstelligen könnte, um darüber einen anständigen Artikel zu schreiben, aber trotzdem gefällt mir die Idee, daraus etwas Regelmäßiges zu machen. Wie wär’s mit jeweils einmal gegen Ende des Monats? Das könnte klappen.

Herzlichen Dank jedenfalls an alle, die mich anfeuern, und ich hoffe, ihr werdet nicht allzu lange darauf warten müssen, erneut von mir zu hören. Macht’s gut, trinkt genug Wasser, und erwägt, euch für das kommende Wetter ein Eis zu kaufen!