I'm back
Hello, non-existent reader!
So did I for a while, and then I decided I was a lemon for a couple of weeks. I kept myself amused all that time jumping in and out of a gin and tonic.
Yeah, I know, the last post was almost a year ago. To be honest, I wanted to give this whole thing up, I even deactivated the card connected to my AWS account (it had a month to live anyway, and Amazon won’t let you just delete the payment method)… But then I remembered all the effort put into this, and I didn’t want it to go to waste, so I decided to keep the blog after all.
A lot has happened in that time. There have been some good moments. For example, last December I bought a house. I didn’t take out a mortgage, I bought it - paid the full amount all at once, and now it is 100% mine.
Yes, that’s me, how could you tell?
“Whoa, a golden kid,” you’ll say. Believe it or not, I did it on my own. My mum and dad helped me, but only morally. I’ve been saving up for six years, Carl!
Okay, okay, you got me - actually, THIS is me
This has been an important goal for me for a long time, and achieving it is a significant milestone for me. I kept planning what furniture I would buy, what curtains I would hang (not as zealously as the Narrator in Fight Club, but very actively)… And then, in February this year, war broke out in my country. I am not going to say much about it - everyone already knows everything. For health reasons, I am unfit for peacetime military service - consequently, I did not serve in the army and have no experience of handling weapons. The Armed Forces of Ukraine did not need such fighters (both at the start of the war and until now), so my support was purely material (donations to reliable funds, humanitarian aid). I continued to work at my “main” job - it is not difficult for us programmers - but I was too depressed to work on NetShag (and I thought it would be somehow… wrong?). But after a while, I decided to return to this project. You know, in the early days the official channels on Telegram posted a lot of advice from psychologists on how to cope with everything that was going on. And one of them argued that you shouldn’t put things off until “after the war”. If you have the opportunity and the desire to do what you love, you should do it now. After all, if you are not living now, it means that the enemy has already broken you morally.
I’ve posted some updates on Itch.io. I think I’m ready to share the link to the game (the amount of content is still nothing to speak of, but anyway): https://synthoel.itch.io/netshag
I have also published some devlogs there. In the future, I will continue to publish devlogs there, and will only link them here. What will I post here if all the talk about the game will be on Itch? I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing. Maybe something personal - I haven’t decided yet, that needs inspiration. I still have a lot of plans (regarding the game and beyond), but planning now has to be very careful, so I won’t say anything yet.
See you.