happy disability pride month and good luck to any art fight-ers! so, i've been learning how to write recently so i could make fanfiction. i haven't written anything since high school english, so it was quite the learning process. what did i learn? never write an 11-chapter fic for your first one! and other stuff, too.

the fic i'm writing is a crossover between two bits of media i enjoy. that's, by nature, going to be quite contrived and rely a lot on suspension-of-disbelief. being the kind of person i am, though, i went and tried to logic everything out anyway. and it actually worked?? the mechanics all fit together in believable ways that didn't break the tone of either story. with that sorted, i got to making a plot outline. it was surprising with how much i could do with it; i came out with 8 chapters in total. didn't i say it was 11 chapters? well, when i started actually writing the thing, i kept finding more ways to flesh it out. one chapter i split up because i was halfway through its outline and it was already over 2K words. mid-way, i thought up a side plot that would focus on characters i hadn't used much. coming into it, i was expecting to not have enough to write about, but the issue was the opposite!

my spelling and grammar is all good, but there's far more to writing than just that. i wrote the first 2 chapters in present tense without realising it. i found out afterward it's rare in stories because it's much harder to keep consistent, so i went back and edited it into past tense. fortunately, it didn't take long since i caught it early. i learnt a lot about writing dialogue, such as dialogue tags, why you should avoid them, how to use action beats to replace them, and making dialogue sound natural. i still struggle with that last one, and i'm sure many others do too. it feels painfully obvious to me that all the characters i write are just "me in different hats"... maybe it isn't as clear to a reader. either way, i'm sure i'll get better at it. i hope i can; it's going to help me write dialogue for my games!

moving on... my fic ended up being dialogue-heavy given that it's a multiverse crossover; the characters are bound to have a lot to talk about. having lots of dialogue isn't bad per se, but it hasn't given me much practice on describing settings, actions, emotions, et cetera. for my next fic, i plan to have a solo character so i can focus on just those. speaking of characters, an all-too-common pitfall of new writers (and now myself) is head-hopping. my story, and most others, are written in limited third-person. that's third-person written from a POV character's perspective, meaning the reader only sees what that POV sees. head-hopping is when you describe something the POV couldn't know, such as a different character's thoughts or their actions when they're out of view. writing my fic, i kept finding spots where i head-hopped by accident. fortunately, it's (usually) easy to fix; i just rewrote those parts so the POV could reasonally observe them. i'm getting better with it, but i still slip up a lot.

there were more subtle things i had to learn; one such thing is varying sentence length. long sentences that drag on and on aren't inherently bad, but too many in a row gets tiring for the reader. on the other hand, too many short sentences breaks the reader's flow by making them stop and start constantly. another thing is mixing up word order. the basic sentence structure goes like "subject does verb" or "subject does verb to object". basic sentences are fine in most cases. i found that a great catch-all test is to simply read your work aloud. if it sounds odd, it will in a reader's mind too.

currently, i've finished 7 of 11 chapters of my fic. i'm sure it has many flaws, it's my first real work, but i'm still proud of myself. i took that first step and got much further than i'd expected. also, it's gained a little attention on AO3; 21 kudos already! that's 21 individuals who read my work and enjoyed it. it's easy to reduce it to just a number, but i have to remember what it represents. i'm grateful to those readers for keeping me motivated; i'll do my best to see this fic through.

also i started using em dashes—i'm an LLM now sorrgy

for as long as consoles could produce sound, video games were accompanied by music. as a fledgling game developer, that means i need to know how to make my own. that was what i thought well back when i was a kid making games in Scratch.

i had a game called Rocket Jump 2 (very creative), a platformer with the eponymous mechanic as the focus. looking back on it, it was rather impressive! i figured out that, to circumvent Scratch's lack of a movable camera, i could implement "camera scrolling" by simply moving the entire world rather than the player. it had multiple levels, achievements, full visual and audio effects, tech like wall-jumping and rocket syncs, and so on. i've deleted my Scratch account by now, though; i wish i hadn't done that, i would have loved to play something my younger self made.

anyway... this game needed music. i was using the soundtrack from Baba is You as placeholder, but they happened to fit the game perfectly. i searched up what tool the developer (Hempuli) used to make the soundtrack—it was OpenMPT, a music tracker tool. there was a lot you needed to do manually, like importing samples and setting up envelopes for them. you'd place notes by essentially coding the time and channel of each one with little visual feedback available. all this to say, it wasn't the best choice for a beginner composer like me. usually you'd start with beepbox or bosca ceoil...? i was one stubborn bugger though and i kept at it. it did help that i used to play piano (because my parents forced me to learn :p). eventually, i made a few songs! they sucked, i'm not sugarcoating it, but this is only the start of my journey.

i had been playing a lot of this game called Mindustry. it's a tower defense & factory & RTS hybrid game (if that interests you, it's free on itch.io). i heard the developer, Anuke, used a free software called LMMS to make the soundtrack. he'd posted the project files for it, so i started tinkering with them to learn how to use LMMS. if it wasn't for those, i wouldn't have learnt nearly as quickly; that's the value of sharing your work, y'all.

around the same time, i started using MuseScore, a music notation software, to make sheet music for songs i liked. i did this so i could play them on piano without having to pay for the subscription (LOL). in school, i had weekly performances for music class, and i'd play these transcriptions i made. most students played classical or pop music, i was quite the outlier! anyway, i had these transcriptions, and i was learning to use LMMS, so i had the idea to make arrangements for them. primarily, i wanted to arrange the Bug Fables soundtrack, inspired by DM Dokuro's Cave Story Arranged. someone suggested i posted them on YouTube, which i did; though, since i didn't know any better programs, i used Microsoft Clipchamp which totally crushed the quality. despite that, these gained some traction, enough to pique the interest of another musician in the community. we became friends and worked along each other. they happened to get me into Rain World, a game that's now one of my greatest inspirations. we've drifted apart now, alas.

moving on, i kept experimenting, starting to make my own songs. i saw that people made fan-made threat themes for Rain World; that is, tracks that play dynamically with on how much danger you're in. i thought it'd be fun to make one of my own for The Wall, a region in the game. unexpectedly, it blew up, reaching over 100K views as of writing this post. tryn, a developer of the Extra Threat Themes mod, reached out to me to add my theme to it, a real surprise at the time. i'm truly grateful!

fast forward to now, i've made and released a few original tracks. they haven't gained nearly the attention of that threat theme, but i'm proud of them nonetheless. i'm eager to how my music will develop. maybe one day it'll play in my own games?

ADDENDUM: so i remembered when you delete a Scratch project, it doesn't remove any remixes (basically, edits anyone can make of your project) of it. i found a remix with fairly minimal edits (here) and took some screenshots:

i didn't give myself enough credit; this really was impressive. i made lens flare by adding a bloom sprite to the sun that hid itself when it touched the background layer. i made motion blur by duplicating the background and offsetting it based on your velocity. maybe i have more potential than i realise...

whoops it's been 3 months. anyway, i recently discovered that i'm plural. so what does that mean?

plurality is the existence of multiple self-aware entities in the brain^[1]. a system is the group that resides within a brain, and headmates are the individuals within that group. there are other terms people use; i've simply listed the ones i prefer here. plurality may or may not be a new concept to you, but i'd already known several systems online. before that, i first discovered it from a VRChat interview with one. i thought it was really cool (if only every human had that attitude) and latched onto the idea since.

initially i dismissed the thought of being plural myself, but as time went on, i began debating it more and more. i'd often be in my own world just conversing with myself. i felt a profound level of disconnect with my body, like i was merely observing the world through someone else's eyes. eventually, i found out about two things that made it click: a.) it's extremely common for systems to doubt themselves, even those who have been out for several years, and b.) every system differs; not every one is composed of entirely distinct beings.

my last hurdle was feeling like i had to identify each of my selves. every system i'd known of had a complete list of their headmates, but nothing i tried seemed to get anywhere. even now, i'm not sure how other systems go about identifying them (if you're reading this and know more, do let me know!) learning about that last point really helped me; i stopped trying to force us to be more different.

learning i was plural has answered many questions i had about myself, and brought up just as many. if you know me personally, it's unlikely it will change anything; we have the same experiences and memories, and none have any preferred pronouns. regardless, i'm glad to have discovered this about me.

this is Generic Topdown Shooter. it's my first published game, but i've actually been a game dev for quite some time. let's see how i got here.

way back in primary school, a friend and i discovered Scratch, a website that you could make games with just by snapping code blocks together. we churned out dozens of poorly made, but genuine, projects. game dev became our passion. our ambitions were unbound.

secondary school came around. we decided we were too grown-up for Scratch, and picked up Unity. some things were familiar, but otherwise we were starting from scratch (heh). so, we got to learning. my friend found out about game jams: competitions where you must make a game based on a theme in a certain time-frame. the perfect way to learn—the limited time forces you to keep your games small. we found an upcoming jam and joined together!

no, i didn't. why should i bother with silly little game jams? my ideas were way too great for them. so i kept chipping away at my dream game. my friend, meanwhile, joined jam after jam. he improved, little by little.

the years passed. i continued with my project. i stagnated. he found a small team to work with. i burnt out. he became better than me in every way. i gave up quietly.

then, high school was over. i began seeing a psychologist. we talked about setting goals, and i thought: i've tried game dev before. why not give it another go? so there was my goal: "i will finish a game by the end of August." this time, i was okay with failing. i'd just set an easier goal.

but i didn't fail. it's not an impressive game. it's a generic topdown shooter. but it's mine.

(and i didn't need AI to make it lol!!)

welcome to my first blog post. i've been thinking, i'm a thing with a lot of thoughts; but social media is public and algorithmic and all that. then i thought, why not put a blog on your website? and here we are. well, this is not really a blog, just a page that i add text to manually. good enough for me!