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.

Getting back on track, here’s a quick rundown of the other major happenings this year:

• A trip to Mallorca with the entire company in late May/early June
• Me getting sick with a middle-ear infection in both ears for all of July
• Said prolonged sickness wrecking my mental health to the point where, in September, I finally caved and made use of the services of the therapist employed by my company
• Completing a 30-day sketching challenge without missing a single day (even if I ended up not drawing anything else since then)
• A stream for the 6th anniversary of the Mukai Project (which also had me nursing the first hangover of my life the morning after, and it was nasty), and...
• Rearranging the furniture in my bedroom in November, resulting in me making enough room to set up a gaming corner

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.

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.