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.

I promise, I wanted to get one of these out last month to keep with the once-a-month schedule I’d set for myself, but then I just... didn’t find the time for it. Granted, it’s not like a lot happened in September, anyway.

But anyway, hope everyone’s been well. Summer has finally ended, at least this side of the equator. And with this month came and went my birthday, too – I’m 28 years old now. Not getting any younger, so it’s all the more important that I make as much as possible out of what time I have left.

...And, fittingly enough, I actually have the rest of the month off from work, starting from my birthday last Saturday, so I figured, hey, might as well use all that free time in a productive manner. So with this month’s log, I’d like to update you not just on what I did, but primarily on what I’m planning to do.

First talking point would be that new album I’ve mentioned before at at least one point in the past. So far there’s still only four tracks done, and I haven’t written anything else in months. A lot of that is due to what I can only describe as crippling anxiety at the thought of composing anything. In particular, it’s instrumentation that tends to cause me the most grief, since I often struggle to find good instruments to use, and it quickly discourages me from continuing to try.

I think I may need to do a better job of planning the complete instrumentation for a song in advance. After all, my own discography already provides me with plenty of references for what does and doesn’t work, not to mention what’s my signature style. I just need to get over that mental blockade, and there’s no two ways around just chipping away at it bit by bit. If all goes well, I might have a new song done for the album by the end of the month, as well as the momentum to do at least half an hour of music stuff every morning before work. A 2023 release obviously isn’t in the cards anymore, but it’s still my biggest active project to date, so the more consistently I can make progress towards it, the better.

Something else I’ve also hinted at in the past was my intention to relaunch this website. And, well, work on that has officially started! I’m currently in the process of rewriting everything from scratch to revolve around object-oriented PHP, applying the knowledge I’ve gained from my job. The goal here is to modularize the code, splitting it off into smaller chunks to make things easier to expand and maintain. This means PHP classes for everything, which also meant having to write a class autoloader. That one wasn’t too much trouble, but the ever-evolving nature of my code’s directory structure means having to constantly redefine namespaces, which is kind of a pain.

And finally, there’s my gaming backlog. Surprisingly, despite having bought the game on day one, I still haven’t actually beaten Tears of the Kingdom yet. Not that I’m not close – in fact, all that’s left to do in the main story is beat the final boss – but I’ve been trying to at least do all the shrines and sidequests before putting an end to things.

Other games I’m currently playing through are Ecco the Dolphin on the Mega Drive, and Aztec Adventure on the Master System. The former has passwords for me to save my progress with, but the latter is a single-session slog taking upwards of an hour to play through fully, and while I have reached the final stage once by now, it’ll take at least a few more attempts to learn and get through it.

Incidentally, I have a Trello board to keep track of my backlog with, but as of writing this, there are no less than 34 unbeaten games on it (not all in progress, though), so... honestly, putting any significant dent into it would be a full-time job unto itself. Doesn’t help that I prefer to do my Mega Drive and Master System gaming on console, rather than emulator (if I can help it), and the consoles are hooked up to the living room TV, meaning I can only play them while my mom’s asleep or at work, since she’s occupying the TV all day otherwise.

You may also notice that anything involving drawing is conspicuously missing from this list... but, to be fair, I feel like I already have my hands full with just about everything else. As much as I’d love to get back into drawing again, there are other things I need to get on top of first, and organizing myself is never without extreme amounts of effort and vigilance.

But I think that’s also the extent of what’s worth talking about this month. Here’s hoping to another update a month from now, preferably with good news about having been able to make some good habits stick again.

I’ll be honest: I probably would’ve written this a whole lot sooner if I hadn’t gotten it into my head that I wanted to move away from Wordpress and create my own custom blog. But on the bright side, I can at least say that a lot has happened since January — a lot of really good stuff, in fact.

After some extremely devastating events happening to me right at the end of last year as a result of my own actions, I came to a realization that had been long overdue: My unhappiness with myself and my life was, more than anything else, my brain trying to tell me that I had to sit down, think about what exactly it is that I feel unsatisfied with, and then actively take steps to change it instead of just wallowing in misery and learned helplessness.

As soon as I fully grasped that and began to get the hang of forcing myself to act, things suddenly began to improve drastically, and I found myself accomplishing things I didn’t think I was even capable of. Fast-forward to today, and it genuinely feels like my mental health is the best it’s ever been since at least 2018, if not 2002. Having a sense of agency over oneself truly does wonders for one’s mental and emotional well-being.

So what have I been able to do with that newfound mental fortitude? For starters, I’ve done a lot of journaling on what helps and hurts my productivity, and finally came up with a plan that works for me: In addition to a small, daily to-do list of roughly 3-5 items, I’m also keeping a priority list of sorts now. I use that to keep track of mid-to-long-term tasks, categorizing them into ones with deadlines and ones without, and keeping detailed notes for each of them regarding what I need to do, what problems and roadblocks there may be, and what my first/next steps should be towards getting closer to completing a given task. And when they’re done, I move them to a section for finished tasks at the very bottom of the list, noting the date at which I completed them. It can be quite encouraging, watching that bottom list grow over time.

This system of prioritizing tasks and looking at them one step at a time has also resulted in a huge step forward with my life! I’d redoubled my efforts to send out job applications, and I can proudly say that, after nearly two years of freeloading, I’ve finally been hired somewhere! For the time being, it’s a three-year apprenticeship at a web development agency, but chances are good that I’d be taken on as a proper employee after I’ve been fully trained, and even so, I’d already be making a not-insignificant wage. I start next month, on the 3rd of July. Wish me luck!

Let’s talk a bit about my other creative endeavors, too, though. Progress on my album, for instance, is currently at just under 30%. I can’t say I don’t love what I have of it so far, but I would’ve liked to be further along than I currently am. Burnout and fear of failure have been ever-present companions slowing me down considerably, and with the added prospect of 40-hour work weeks starting from next month, a 2023 release is looking increasingly unlikely... at least for as long as my process of composing remains as inconsistent as it currently is. I’ve already figured out other conundrums in my life, though, so I’m sure I’ll figure this one out eventually, too.

You may also remember me talking about getting back into drawing by doing figure sketches back in January. I feel like I’ve been making quite a lot of progress since then, slowly getting to grips with the finer details of human anatomy, one body part at a time. Granted, my execution is still lagging behind what theoretical knowledge I have, but I’ve been fortunate enough to find a good mentor who knows how to keep me motivated and has an extremely keen eye for details. Maybe I’ll even end up producing some new illustrations sometime this year. We’ll see.

Some of you may have caught on to my recently-rekindled interest in the acquisition of foreign languages, too. For example, I started teaching myself Spanish last September, and while I’m certainly nowhere near fluent yet, I still find myself capable enough to hold conversations in it already. It’s made me want to pick up some other Romance languages, too, with my current focus being on French and Portuguese. That said, I do still want to expand my Spanish, as well as break through the plateau I feel like I’ve been stuck on with Japanese for several years now. And in the future? Who knows? Maybe I’ll pick up Swedish and Finnish again, maybe I’ll dabble in a completely different language. Either way, the dream of being a polyglot lives on.

Any other plans, then? Well, there unfortunately still isn’t much leeway for working on the second Mukai game — my art skills are still lagging behind, all my time spent on composing goes towards my new album, and without assets, there’s not much point in coding anything yet — but I have been thinking of another project to maybe work on in the distant future.

As a kid, I used to love working with RPG Maker. There’s this really crappy game I somehow completed start to finish with RPG Maker VX within its 30-day trial period, and aside from that and possibly dozens of other game projects I started and then dropped within a week, there’s one idea that I actually put some legitimate thought and planning into before I started working on it... Of course, I never finished that one, either, but even after all these years, the premise still holds a place in my heart, and I’d love to revive and expand on it. Plus, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at creating an RPG engine in Game Maker. I think it’d be a fun challenge.

That’s about the extent of what’s been going on over the first half of this year, I’d say. I remember when I used to want to write these logs once every two weeks... and while I highly doubt that I can get enough done in such a short time frame to make it worth writing about, the idea of making them a regular thing is nevertheless an enticing one. Maybe once a month, specifically somewhere during the final third of each month? That could work.