莉奈

So one of the things in the development of my game that I've been neglecting for a long time is sound-design. I've created a very decent engine for the project, but the whole experience is entirely silent right now. To be fair, this has been pretty low priority, since it's not really been an issue when I've demoed my work at noisy conventions, or shared it with friends, but if I really want to take this thing seriously, I'm going to have to start putting in some music.

Here's the thing though: I've never composed a single thing in my life. I've played a little with instruments in high school, and I once lived for a pretty extended period with an active composer, so I'm not completely blind, but this is definitely going to be a learning experience. To be fair, a lot of things in this development process have been learning experiences, but I'm not really sure where to start with this one.

I mean, as  far as my own situation goes, I was in a split family in which both sides disowned me at similar times for completely different reasons. My mother was a narcissistic bully who constantly belittled me, and alongside her husband, physically beat me up many times throughout my childhood until I eventually broke away. In fact, the specific incident that put me on the streets was because it had just rolled into December, and I still hadn’t bought my mother a Christmas present yet. Honestly, it wasn’t uncommon for my mother to demand gifts from me holiday seasons, and chastise me if I screwed up and got the wrong thing. It’s not even like I was a particularly demanding kid myself, in fact, I often struggled to even think of gifts that I wanted, but I was always forced to make a list anyway, as not doing so was supposedly an excuse to get out of giving her a gift. This is a major reason that I’ve always been extremely uncomfortable around the winter holiday seasons, and have still to this day, not celebrated Christmas at all, or exchanged a single gift during the holiday. Technically, I was never explicitly disowned, but they did beat me up and kick me out, and I’ve been sure to keep my distance ever since.

My father was much more explicit about completely cutting me off. There were already a lot of tensions between us, because I rejected his religion of being a Jehovah’s Witness, and he later married a woman that I hated, that was even more cultishly religious. I mean, these were people who actually had their church monitoring and reprimanding their sexual conduct prior to their marriage, and weren’t allowed to be alone in their own home together. They also had other really weird habits, like never leaving the TV on during commercials, as it would leak demonic images into the house.

Naturally, an LGBT child didn’t really fly in that kind of family, but honestly, It’d be misleading to say that I was ostracised from my family due to my sexuality. I mean, it’s true in the case of my dad, but he was barely much of a parent to me in the first place. I only ever saw him once every few months, and I’d already been estranged from my mother by this point, which was ultimately what put me on the streets anyway, because my dad would never have lifted a finger to help in such a situation. In fact, at the time my school panicked about me being on the streets, and phoned around to try and find something for me, and when they eventually called my dad as a last resort, the teacher’s jaw dropped when he told her that he wasn’t able to help because he was “too busy decorating.”

I put together a concept trailer for the game I’m working on, and uploaded it all for my birthday! ^_^

California is the best place I’ve been to. I definitely intend to eventually settle there once I get a bunch of things sorted out.

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure.I don’t think I’ll still be in the UK by then. I’m looking at going back to California in September.