So, recently I’ve been feeling unmotivated (a lot more than I’ve talked about with others) and this has resulted in the production of basically everything I’m doing slowing down to a snail’s pace. I’ve figured out a way to solve this problem, though so hopefully that’s going to be less of an issue in the future.
“WHAT?! YOU HAVEN’T BEEN WORKING?! YOU’RE DROPPING THE GAME?!” Shut the hell up, I never said that. I just said I haven’t made MUCH progress since the last update. What I have made progress on is a bit of script writing, some of the character, item and skill editing (there’s a lot of that to do, so making a dent in that is not a bad thing) and the music. Although the music isn’t exactly ready for anything yet, I do have a question regarding it later in this Devlog that I will need y’all to give me some opinions on.
Onto the main issue. I’ve realized that regardless of how much I enjoy what I do and want to do it… it still all involves work. It all involves exerting mental effort in order to accomplish an end goal. Me enjoying it doesn’t mean it’s inherently relaxing. I’m still putting stress on myself, and I just realized a little bit ago (yesterday, as I write this) that I’m near the breaking point of how much stress I can handle.
Long story short, I’ve been pushing myself way too hard and I never even realized it. Now, I’m not announcing an official hiatus or anything, I’m just letting you know one of the biggest reasons as to why I have been doing jack shit lately. This is really not going to affect too much in the long run, I just need to stop pushing myself into working so hard because if I don’t take some leisure time to play some games casually, watch anime, etc. I won’t really be putting my true heart and soul into the project and the end product is going to look like garbage. Along with that, if I put too much stress on myself, I’m gonna get sick a lot more and that’s just gonna make everything pile up even further. Basically, I’m just gonna take some days off for the next few days, doing minimal work (Basically just school and professional interactions) and then get back to working full-force next week. I hope you understand my situation… If you don’t, just keep in mind that this isn’t me saying I’m dropping the game or going on hiatus. This is just me explaining why I haven’t got much in this update as far as progress and what I’m going to do to prevent this from affecting me in the future.
The other reason is… music is hard. I’ve been trying to write a primary boss theme, one that’d be used for most bosses, and I’ve got a good idea of how to get a secondary boss theme, one that’d be used more sparingly, but the primary boss theme… I haven’t got a damn thing for it. I’ve tried so hard, but I’ve never even gotten far enough to quote Linkin Park about it.
That’s when I realized that I could try something a little different. Originally, my announcement of the game stated that I would have a “Mostly original soundtrack,” keyword there is “MOSTLY.” I’m definitely making things like town themes and dungeon themes and such, but some things I’ll be using RWBY music for and some things I’ll be using miscellaneous music for. For the boss music especially, I had intended to record and produce the music myself using the tools I had at my college. Don’t expect anything immediately because I’m still learning to work the studio, but I will, for sure, be recording one thing before the end of this quarter… partially because it will be my final project. Beyond that, I’ll have some better access to tools and better knowledge of music mixing and production using professional DAWs like Pro Tools.
Anyways, now that I’ve explained the situation, I will now proceed to ask the question I had mentioned… Would you all mind if I did a cover song for the primary boss theme? If I were to do that, It would take significantly less time to make that theme and I could get onto other things faster. I know the exact song I would be recording already, and I’ve found a backing track for it that’s essentially just the drums, which is exactly what I needed. On the other hand, I could continue trying to write my own music for it, which will most likely take significantly longer.
I ask this because I want an opinion on this from the people who are going to be playing the game. Either way, it’s going to be music that just fits over a boss fight. Regardless of which option you choose, it will not loop seamlessly and there will be definitive parts of the song rather than it being the kind of looping battle music that most RPGs use.
Here is the poll for this question:
If you choose the suggestion option, place your suggestion in the comments of this devlog.
Thanks for reading through all of that, I know it was a lot, but I felt like I needed to let you guys know all of this along with that question. With nearly 200 followers on this game, I need to give updates every now and again, regardless of how little progress I’ve made.
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