at the start of the year i summed up my goals for 2024 as "I want to unabashedly express myself through the games I make". this is still the case!
i've been thinking about it a lot recently, now that i've finished prototyping my game's combat and i need to start working on its world, characters and narrative. if i just take the path of least resistance throughout the rest of the game's development, i'll have an interesting and unique grid-based bump combat system and some cute enemy sprites wrapped in a bland paint-by-numbers top-down action adventure game package.
(the sprites don't really have anything to do with the post, i just wanted to show them off)
anyway, this sucks! even if the combat is good enough to carry the rest of the game, there would still be a ton of wasted potential if i didn't even try to make the rest of the game live up to it. and as i said, my biggest goal for this year is that i want to express myself with my art! all i'm really expressing with this game so far, outside of the combat mechanics, is that i like cute chunky animal sprites. this is true, but there's more to me than that! so i'd better get to work on building an interesting world and filling it with wonderful characters.
after spending a while thinking about all this, i can't help but reflect on how i use cohost. i first joined the site shortly after i left twitter in 2022, in part because i saw some of my friends and acquaintances deal with a shocking amount of harassment and creeps over there. so even though cohost didn't seem anywhere near as bad as twitter, i made a conscious decision to not really say anything about myself on social media. i'd only ever announce things about my game or give straightforward and largely unopinionated game development advice.
it's become clear to me since then that the atmosphere over here is pretty nice, but i haven't really changed how i post. as a result, i feel like i'm acting as a far less interesting version of myself when i post over here than when i stream on twitch, post on patreon or my newsletter, talk with friends or on discord servers, or communicate in pretty much any other way.
so i'd like to change that. i'm not going to immediately start dropping hot takes or posting hole or whatever (one step at a time...) but i'd really like to start acting a bit more like a human and a bit less like the PR department of C.T. Matthews Studios. especially because i've been on HRT for long enough that i'm starting to find it much easier than before to express emotions and socialize, ironically making it harder to repress that side of myself over here on cohost.
anyway, this post is an extremely long-winded way of saying that i'll probably be posting more jokes and opinions and asks (feel free to ask me anything as always) and fewer upper case letters than before. i hope you don't mind!
