Welp.

So; The past week has been... interesting. The house is sinking into the ground and that caused a gas leak. My dog and cat are both sick again so I am trying to figure out what is causing it... whatever it is also seems to be causing a sinus infection for me. I'm going to go through the back of the house and do some deep cleaning today hopefully figure it out.

Really need to find some funds to get the hell out of here before this place kills us... so that brings me to the things that have been running through my head all last week. I have gotten nowhere with it of course. Just bouncing off the walls of my mind trying to figure out a clear path out of this mess.

I would like to just sit here and work on games all the time and I would if I could but right now I need a more solid way of getting us out of here. I have no idea how, really. One of the many drawbacks of a hermit lifestyle is having no contacts.

I also lack self confidence, being self-taught in everything and observing a lot of people in programming jobs that I think may need more time in the oven if you know what I mean. I don't want to be some incompetent jackass causing problems for other people.

Maybe I am alright as a programmer but I don't really know. For all I know I could be a genius or completely garbage at it. As a system admin I can get things done but I haven't had any experience at enterprise level despite running enterprise grade servers for my own needs and fun, but no profit unfortunately.

I keep hitting this point with game development where I feel like I am being selfish, irresponsible and foolish. It's the one thing I know I have a shot with doing and being happy with but I keep falling back into this thought; "Maybe I should just be responsible and work at some web development company... or become a back-end contractor. It would be a regular paycheck.". Then I drop my current project, start refreshing my web development skills and looking around at jobs and just get absolutely miserable. It gets really, really dark sometimes.

So I push as far into that as I can until I can't take it anymore and go back to the default; game dev and servers. I can only run Godot on this machine as far as I have tested. Unity locks up and overheats the machine on launch. Unreal obviously out of the question. This limits my ability to join any other studios for the time being unless they were to supply hardware and that's a big leap to take on some bozo on the internet.

Which always comes back to me working alone on some project hoping that it will be finished before the next big crisis resets the cycle. The odds of me even getting a job are pretty low to begin with, I'm a dropout. I hated school and wanted to learn things my way, I was always bored and felt like there was no challenge or purpose to school for me. It was a miserable place, not because I was getting bullied or anything like that... neither the teachers or the students seemed to care at all and for whatever reason it just felt like I was repeating things I learned in elementary school in high school. I could have swore I already learned most of the curriculum years before.

I've not abandoned any of my games, just kinda shelved them. I have all the code for every project I worked on and maybe I should show some of it off here, it could help me figure things out or maybe get a job. Might even help someone else in some way I can't foresee at this moment.

Maybe I will be able to drag myself out of this pit with game development but I have to find a shorter route than Gerucrash. I already feel defeated as far as a "normal job" is concerned so that really just leaves me starting up a business. This is where it gets... interesting. I think I will work on Gerucrash nights and weekends as a free time project and keep posting about whenever I do, but I need a smaller, tighter, quicker dev cycle to get out there first. A dollar game with simple mechanics that is fun and polished. Something in the vain of Vampire Survivors or Flappy Bird.

I keep intending to  make something simple but my brain just can't deal with simple it has to find a way to make a project challenging and complex for some reason. Maybe if I consider the challenge to come from trying to force myself to keep it simple? I don't know if it would work but I haven't tried yet so... I guess I should try, huh?

The simple games I can think of are things like little top-down crafting games or rogue-like dungeon crawlers or clickers... management sim sorts of things can be simple sometimes... uhhh, what else? Just a straight up pet sim game with none of the bells and whistles like I am making with Gerucrash would be fairly simple though I am not sure it would be too popular.

Something I can use assets I licensed or already made in order to cut down on dev time as much as possible. Something 3/4 top-down with either 32x32 or 16x16 tiles. I have a lot of tile-sets and sprite bases in that range, licensed and made by me.

Man thinking about working on another game is depressing but I need to get out of this place before it kills us and I wont be able to get Gerucrash into a playable state that I could feel comfortable asking for money for in time. I need something simple I can charge a small amount for in order to add to our income and get us the hell out of here before this place sinks into the hole or the mold kills us. It's so god damn frustrating.

I need something I can prototype in a couple weeks. I am leaning toward a rogue-like taming dungeon crawler. I feel like all my games need pets in some form.

Or some kind of pet based automation game...

Or... man I have too many ideas. I'll have to go out to the living room and talk with my wife about this, whatever I end up making she'll probably be helping me with anyway and she's more up to date on the more modern games that a lot of people play. I just like to live in my strange world of old MMOs and immersive sims.

Whatever I make it has two rules; Available publicly in under two months(preferably a month, potentially with a prototype out within a week or 2 to get some feedback) and of course it has to be a game I would want to play otherwise it's pointless.

I will work on Gerucrash and testing my hosting setup for games in the evenings and this game in the days, whatever it is.

I guess it's time for some brainstorming. Normal life just isn't a path for me, I have to cut my own path here...