I had something of a sobering moment the other day. I was wandering my old (and new) hometown during Shiny Rattata Day, and eventually I found myself at my old high school. I’d graduated 11 years ago, and most of my old teachers were either retired or transferred to different schools, but I did get to meet my old Drama teacher, which is awesome because she’s the one I wanted to see the most. I’d been the Improv manager and a regular in the school plays, so I’d spent many nights after school working on producing all sorts of theatrical events with her, and she asked me how I’d been doing since graduating. I explained to her that I’d moved to SF to get a game design degree and had been working in video games, and only recently moved back home for money reasons after getting written out of a startup I’d helped found. She asked how the family was doing and I talked about how my brother recently got promoted to head of HR at a startup.  She talked to me a bit about the plays they’d put on and how the school was doing, but she had to excuse herself shortly to manage the rehearsal that was about to start.

At the time, I thought we’d had a pleasant conversation, but later that night when I’d gone home I realized just how much of a corporate tool I must have sounded like. I had nothing to talk to her about except work and jobs, I bet she was disappointed in what I’d turned out to be. I never really expected to be so focused on employment, but it’s kinda been the driving force of my life since I left Ohio to break into games. I’ve been telling myself “once I pull it off, once I’m in the industry, I’ll start having a social life and hobbies again” but I’m starting to realize this ride never really stops. The increasingly-pessimistic tone of these blog updates are an indication that I need to restructure my priorities a little bit and keep the big picture in mind.

I started exercycling back up last night, and I just reinstalled Unity. An old SPUF friend added me on discord recently and when we learned we both wanted to know Unity, agreed to take a tutorial together. We’ll be starting with Pro builder next week.

There are some other cool things happening, and I’ll get into them in a future blog post, but for now I just want to apologize for the depressing tone I’d taken in my last few posts. Leaving San Francisco was a huge blow to my pride, but in all other metrics it’s done wonders for my mental health. I hope to have some more updates on gaming-oriented creative projects–like this blog was founded to talk about–real soon.