I guess you could consider this something of an update to a post I made three days ago after my dog, Peanut, passed away. Peanut had been with me for more than a decade, we found him as a puppy on the street in 2013 and he had lived with my family ever since in what I sure hope I was able to ensure was a happy life before he passed away shortly after midnight on Friday, May 16th, 2025. In a lot of ways he was my dog rather than a family pet. I was the person who convinced my mom to take him in, and I'd been his primary caretaker for most of his life. As far as I am concerned, Peanut was my child. All I can do now is hope I succeeded in giving him a good life.

I struggle to understand emotions. I am on the autism spectrum and have alexithymia, also known as emotional blindness, which, in combination with a neurodivergence that is often stigmatized due to those on the spectrum struggling to understand others and accidentally coming across as aloof and unaware, makes expressing myself feel like a huge challenge both in terms of successfully getting the message across and in bringing myself to even try to. I think so much of what attracts me to artistic hobbies such as drawing, building things in Minecraft, writing fantasy, and, yes, my indie game developing, is that art feels a natural way to express how I feel. I feel like it's important for artists of any form to inject their feelings into their craft, especially if they struggle to express themselves in other ways like I do. I feel it's important that I use this hobby of mine, one I take seriously enough that it's effectively a second job in my mind, as a medium through which to process my loss.

I feel like I have an almost perfect opportunity to explore how I feel through an artistic lense here too. I haven't at all, pretty much, thought into Hensen's motives as a character and it seems fitting that a character like Hensen Hopper, a vigilante, namely, would be doing what he is doing due to having lost someone he cares about to the force that he is fighting, the Yellow Jackets. When it comes to how I will integrate this into the premise of the game, I want to explore my own feelings toward having just lost possibly the most beloved pet I've had up to this point in my life and use what I find to breathe life into Hensen Hopper's character.

I'm going to be returning to work on Thursday (talking about my actual job at the warehouse) but I feel like I'm up to getting back into gamedev in the two days between today and then. Tomorrow, I really want to spend some time fleshing out Hensen Hopper as a character so I may not post too much to Game Jolt because much of what I will be doing will be on the storyboard side.

I'm sorry this post was a lot lengthier than usual, as always, the summary up-top is gonna act as a tl:dr for everything I've just written.