Hello hello! Okay cool, recording my voice is working. I’m trying out voice-typing for this entry.

I’m on my way back from the school run at the moment. How are things looking this week?

I am exhausted.

Not sleeping well. I injured my shoulder last year. It’s likely a rotator cuff tear that I'm going to need surgery on.

I really don't want surgery. So let’s talk about something else to distract me from worrying about that.

Okay, so I'm going to trial run this blog as more of a journal style- the same way we did in early Deviant Art days.

I dunno, I felt like sharing online that way at least appeared more genuine and from the heart. I think maybe these days we’re all guilty of sharing in a less genuine way, more tailored in a way that’s for how we feel we should be perceived. In a way that’s not for us. I just want this to be pure cathartic expression. More personal, like I'm sending a voice not to a friend.

This week's been an odd one. I've been learning React this month. But with how much my ADHD makes me jump around to different things, I've found myself returning to Twine which is slightly different to React old school emojis by Hai-Etlik on Deviant Art!

Twine is a framework used mostly for making either visual novel games or prototypes of narrative systems for video games. A few years ago I made a very short narrative based game called Stranded. It follows a mech pilot that crash landed on a strange planet. You can finish it in about 5 minutes.

I’m a creative person with ADHD. That combination means I have a lot of ideas and make a lot of things, but I don't finish most of them. Stranded is a short, small game. But it is something I actually finished- along with one of my best friends who did the art for the characters.

Is spending my precious spare time learning Twine going to boost my “career capital” as a Web Developer? Probably not. But it is…

…I don't know. There's something really satisfying about it. It's simple to understand and you can quickly implement ideas.

Since I released stranded, I've continued to become a better developer. I’ve been playing around with another Stranded game idea. Like a new “episode” following a different story. Maybe different characters. As well as trying to implement new features and mechanics.

There's a few things I'd like to try but I'm not sure if they’re needed because I think a lot of what made stranded good or why people enjoyed it was that it was quite simple. I mean, it didn't use a lot of fancy mechanics at all.

However, recently my girlfriend's been making me play one of her favourite video games; Broken Sword. Despite it being a very obviously dated point-and-click adventure, I think it still sounds pretty strong today. So I've been taking inspiration from that- like drag and drop and like, you know, mapping out things on a picture of a location and how the player interacts with that.

So I'm trying to work out if it's something I'd like to do, if it's worth doing or whether it's going to unnecessarily complicate the game. I don’t want to take away what people enjoyed from the first Stranded game.

But we will see!

In other news, I have a bit of an addiction to ordering stickers off Etsy for my laptop. I recently found this creator who's made these stickers of the old web badges you used to have on 90s/y2k websites- or, from Geocities/Neocities.

Stickers by Prismatash on Etsy

Stickers by prismatash on Etsy!

I honestly think they're beautiful.

Sorry haha, When I talk about this stuff I suddenly turn from a 35-year-old man to an 80-year-old man telling a story from days of yore.

Anyway, my youngest who’s 9 spotted the stickers and asked about them. So I turned into said story telling old man and you could see some intrigue in his little face.

A couple of days later, he asked if I could show him how to make his own website.

And you know, it's great because unintentionally, web design & development is probably what takes up most of my brain, now that I have over a decade of experience in it thanks to my career.

it's just really… it’s something really nice to see- You know, my youngest. Watching him learn and implement something in code, save it and then see what he's created, his idea shows on the front end of this website he’s made.

It's early days, so very simple stuff right now, but he's learning what classes and IDs are and he seems to be enjoying it. Yeah, I dunno. It's really nice.

The site’s live. It’s essentially a fan page for our pets but it's nice seeing him make something, learning something new and seeing him proud of what he’s learned and created.

I've just dropped him off at school and I think he's now going to tell all his friends the URL for the website.

Which is, of course, adorable.

It's things like this keeping me distracted from the extreme shoulder pain anyway. So thanks for indulging me.

Speak soon!