"post mortem" whatever thingy

I have never made a game before. And that's kind of probably telling, from, well, everything. A lot of things in this are things I've never tried before. I'm most confident, I'd say, in 3d modelling. That's about it. I've never done creative writing before, never tried to actually commit to making sprites and editing them. Never picked out sounds, tried to design characters, used renpy in a development sense, never done much in the way of art. Not very much a creative person, to be honest. A lot of this is new! And it was kind of fun. Good practice, I guess. I don't expect this to really have any presence at all to anyone, and the idea of sharing it with my friends absolutely racks me with fear. But I posted it anyway? I was too sleepy to really bother doing the whole song and dance about my deep fears of having a social / public presence.

A lot of what showed up in this story were amalgamations of feelings I've had and dealt with, retold with some themes I felt would be a good direction for the particular game jam it was made for, the toxic yuri vn jam. A lot of these themes of dissociation and sense of self I haven't really seen out there, and at vulnerable times it's easy enough to just accept that as a sign that what you are suffering from is just made up subconsciously somehow. I don't feel like I did much justice to the meanings some of these themes have to me. But it was the best I had in my head, so it exists now.

Doing the 3D work was pretty fun, I'm very new to making character models, rather than making things that aren't organic and very . It's been pretty rough working with rigs and weighting and textures. Aside from creation of the models, there's also posing, rendering and other post-processing. I know there's a lot of tools out there for that, but I did all I could in paint dot net manually. Lots more than I really expected. But it was good to get some perspective of the work that goes into these things. I feel like for the most part I rushed and cobbled up the other assets from CC0 sources I found. But I guess that's all I really had time for, when it came down to the time I had left before the deadline.

I with full respect for myself and my capacity have to say I fucking struggled to get a lot of this stuff done. I stared at the script for like four weeks out of six without making any progress, and I feel like the last two weeks were the only real time I had with everything else. It's fitting for pretty much everything I do, so considering I actually did what I set out to do, which was make something, I'm okay with that. But perhaps it's an important thing to have put in perspective. Maybe if I'm to try again, knowing this is how things go for me, will have to be worked around knowing this, and perhaps I can find some tactics to get by better.

I am glad I did this, but at the same time, the idea that anyone could ever see it absolutely terrifies me. I think there are, quite fitting to what I wrote, deep feelings of shame I carry over not just the existence of something I have done in a public space, but also being a pretty much total beginner. I knew from the start that I would have to suck at it, and wanted to do it despite that. I wasn't ready for how much that would hurt. Honestly, I only managed to get it done because I had a friend there who knew what I was doing and heard me out.

I think had I not been in the throes of that shame right now, I'd be motivated to go back and add more to smooth things out, but right now I'm just glad it's done and I can rest.