Life goes, and feels like it’s mostly been consumed by work lately. It’s not that work has gotten particularly busier or more difficult than usual, but I’ve found myself having a really stressful time with it anyway. I think a lot of it is probably due to my increased (really, changed) responsibilities and I start overseeing different areas and products from a technical standpoint more than actually embedding within a team and generating code output. When I do end up coding, it’s usually been for either weird things that no one else wants to touch, or cleanup work that is pretty mind-numbing.
I guess we’ll see how things are looking and feeling after this release is over, but it’s been utterly bizarre to no longer be writing code every day, and having solid meeting days become a more frequent occurrence.

In other (perhaps related) news, I’ve been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately. I’m not entirely sure why, since I have no trouble falling asleep during the day if I want to take a nap. But at night, as I lay in bed, it seems there’s just endless thoughts and ideas and concerns that fill my head all at the same time, and I can’t clear my head enough to actually doze off. Often, when I do sleep, I find myself waking up randomly in the middle of the night and then unable to fall back asleep for hours, if at all.
This is a pretty recent problem, and it seems to coincide pretty well with my generally feeling increased stress levels at work, so we’ll see if things get better once we finish this release.

In non-work news, and in terms of things consuming most of my non-work time, I’ve been working on a game. This isn’t particularly new news, given I’ve been working on this game since something like February of this year, but it’s recently become a bit more of a time sink as it’s finished to the point of being playable and I’ve started hiring artists and putting polish onto it. It’s not something I feel comfortable sharing with the world at large yet, but I’ve learned a lot of really interesting things from doing it.

My main takeaways are that I’m really, really appreciating having a well-paying day job, and that I really wish I had any artistic talent whatsoever so I could try my hand at doing at least some of this myself. Also I wish I was filthy rich so I could just finance a bunch of awesome artists to create art unrelated to anything I was doing, because that stuff is hard, yo.
It really feels to me like pretty much anyone can code (especially given how important it’s become, in a lot of ways, now), but very few people can art well, which is only amplified by the fact that the engine I’m using (RenPy) makes it extremely easy for anyone to write a game with basically zero coding ability. The people that seem to make the best games on it seem to be people that can draw sprites and backgrounds and CGs, rather than people that can code.

In other, unrelated news, my second daily photo project ended yesterday. It had long since run its course, and I often found myself going downstairs and taking pictures of the stove or something. Still, I managed to do a daily photo for over a year, which is a pretty nice thing.

This has become a wall of text, so here’s some photos.