eevee

if it helps at all, I thought Clover and Over: Prologue was really good. I thought it was really well written, it communicated what the characters were going through well and it really developed them, and overall I think it was really interesting, like artistically interesting.

So I at least am interested in your writing. I don't know what causes your works to stall, though I understand how hard it can be to finish something while holding it to the best of your own standards. Personally I try to always finish each thing as I start it, even if it gets quite hard going, just as a personal tendency, but everyone has a different process, so the only thing I can say is that your work will probably be interesting enough to publish, even if it doesn't seem quite perfect to you, because you probably have quite high standards. Sometimes just finishing something and getting it out there can be quite energizing, so it could be useful to try to push your work out, even when you think it could have been quite a lot better, and understand that action of pushing it out as part of your artistic process. Future work will improve what was lacking in the current one. And you may find that it was good enough to be appreciated by people, which may also help you drive future work.

At least as artistic practice that can be sometimes useful. Maybe thinking in these terms a bit can help you be comfortable with the way your work progresses? I don't know if what I said is useful to you, but regardless, good luck, I'm really looking forward to whatever you make.

if it's any reassurance: one of me and my friends' absolute favourite games recently has been Mice Tea, which is great not because it's an adult tf vn (although it definitely doesn't hurt lol) but because it uses that premise to lure in unsuspecting victims and proceeds to dropkick them with a cast of really well-written, lovable characters. i'd say arguably the majority of the game is about the cast and what they're going through emotionally - and it fucking RULES.

on the flipside, i am painfully sympathetic to pretty much all the feelings you're talking about. writing can be a special kind of hell on your insecurities, and i haven't really figured out how to handle it either. gamedev is hard, it's always harder than you expect it to be, and you always end up wanting to do more than you can, and you always feel like what you end up making doesn't live up to the version of it in your head. and that Fucking Sucks! but i still think it's often worth doing, and i think those insecurities aren't indicative of how others will perceive your work's quality.

i hope this provides some reassurance that there is absolutely an audience for this - and if nothing else, i'm fuckin' playing this first chance i get. speaking of which, i'm gonna go play Clover and Over: Prologue, because i cannot believe i hadn't heard of this until now.

GOD does this resonate with me. every bit of progress i make on any of my creative/critical projects feels like it was clawed desperately from an abyss of hopelessness. i spent my entire 20s trying to get where i am now, which feels at this exact moment like a dead end. i care tremendously about what i do, of course, which is part of the problem-- i don't just want to make things, i want to make good things. i want to make the kind of art and criticism that i wished had been around when i was younger. i've never been satisfied doing the same thing more than once. i always want to push myself to try new things, to never stay still for too long, to always make the thing as good as i possibly can. which means most of my ideas never get off the ground, because i just can't help myself. when a good idea rears its head and it feels both doable and right, that doesn't seem like scope creep to me, that's just the process.

and yet it always ends up feeling so impossible. things that used to come to me so easily, that by all rights should be well within my ability to accomplish in reasonable time, have become herculean tasks. and i'm medicated!!! i'm on hrt, i'm on adhd meds, i'm on bipolar meds, i am at so much more of a healthy baseline than i was ten years ago and yet i feel disastrously less capable of keeping to a schedule or maintaining interest in virtually anything i make!

i don't know. i don't know what the deal is. "burnout" doesn't even begin to cover it. i'm not just burned out on my job. i've watched all my peers face harassment campaigns & endured a couple myself, i've had multiple people i trusted stab me in the back with disastrous social and economic consequences, i've lost friends and family, i've been evicted twice, and on, and on, and on. all the while there's the pandemic, there's fascism & transphobia, there's just so much omnipresent bad out there right now. and yet if i post the wrong thing in the right place, i know there are people who would love to ruin my life over it.

the stakes should not be so high for something so inconsequential. and the benefit of doing it "right" is that i make just enough money to think i'm doing okay until tax season rolls around and i remember that self-employment in this country is the legal term for suicide note. i just feel so crazy sometimes! other countries give grants to people like us! we're completely on our own out here. no institutional support, no social safety net, very little in the way of cultural give-a-shit for independent creators. every platform we rely on for our careers are owned by a private corporation that literally does not care about the function of the platform, only in its capacity to generate revenue. that infrastructure is now terminally unstable because of course it is, and yet despite how widespread the obvious negative impacts of this have been, our politicians remain irresponsibly (some might even say purposefully) tech illiterate and generally disinterested in learning enough to do something about the instability.

maybe what's worst of all is that this is happening to everyone to some extent, so it feels like there's no excuse to be defeated by it. and that's the attitude of so many people i see online, too-- that there's no merit to these complaints, that we're just lazy, not trying hard enough, not on that grindset, etc etc. it's that this is happening to everyone and yet there is so little solidarity. god there's barely even any awareness. we talk about the creative economy like it's this growing trend of people wanting to participate in a fun side hustle, and not an entire generation of creators who have nowhere else to go but the bespoke company towns of their preferred mediums. it's so short sighted and cannibalistic and mean.

i want to make this work and yet i don't know how it's possible for anyone to make this work, but at the same time i don't know what else to do with myself. i worked my entire 20s to get here. i did so through service jobs and physical labor that's left me exhausted and creaky, and i can't imagine going back to that. i believe what people like us do is of tremendous value, even if it only ever gets seen by a handful of people. that should be enough. there's no reason why that shouldn't be enough. the fact that it isn't weighs on me every moment of every day, and it casts a long shadow over every project i put time into. at this point i feel like my career right now is, essentially, pretending that the entire creative economy isn't on the verge of collapse. just keep doing stuff until the other shoe drops, because this might be my last chance to do so.

i dunno. i hope i'm wrong. i didn't mean to get so political or doomer in this reply, but i guess that's just where my head is at rn