Hey folks! Welcome to this year's year in retrospect. Hope you have a wonderful day. Let me be sentimental for a moment and let me say how grateful I am to be supported here, on Steam or blsky. Many thanks, your feedbacks are greatly appreciated and keep me going through the rough patches. Let's take a look back in time.
Steam release went quite well. Good feedback and bug reports came in and I tried to address all of them in a timely manner. I'm happy that the achievement system works flawless. People have fun collecting them ... more than I do when playing games. (What can I say, I just don't care if i get an achievement for building a house with only ten stones made of recycled underwear fabric or such thing) The release lead to the establishment of me being a self employed Indie dev. Yet, I'm not quite self sustained financially. Officially I jumped up the ladder a knotch or two with the authorities and am a self employed unemployed unless I make a certain amount of money for a specific amount of time. Such are the bureauocratic rules. On top of that ... filing taxes. Nightmare stuff, I tell ya. With the upcoming federal election, my official in charge warned me that, if the conservatives win(which is very likely unfortunately) could raise the pressure on people getting social benefits. And she suggested that I need to expand my business portfolio to counter any negative measurements that could be implemented by the conservatives. Her suggestion was to release my VN on the google playstore, (where her son gets his games from) but she didn't quite caught the process of Early Access and that Cyberlinxxx isn't finished yet and will take another year or two for development. My argument was that I could expand the franchise and my brand and name by releasing my comics(only two but it's a start) on more paltforms. I don't think she really grasps what it means to do my kind of work and trying to sell it via Internet and all the hoops and whatnots, despite explaining it to her. I hope it will expand my reach further. Although the commission fees are absurdly high with a 50% cut. Bloodsuckers, man, I tell ya.
Speaking about cuts. My fridge saw less meat put in it and if there was some it was mostly chicken and poultry. Trying to eat healthier with more veggies in my diet. I don't like what gout is doing to my brother and I wanna avoid that. Hopefully it melts some covid pounds off as well. Fitness has been low for some while now ... years, to be honest. And I want my old fitness levels back! And this year there will be one more bike again in the "garage" of my apartment complex. My mom's health wasn't in good condition as well. It won't get better because of her old age. She needs more care than before. But I don't want to talk about it too much. It's a very personal topic. Still struggling to get the methhead out of the apartment above. We had some annoying trouble like customers comign in and out, trampling on the stairs, loud music all night, threats to the elderly and so on. And the landlord is doing jackshit. I can't express how draining the living situation has been for over a year. But I do enjoy the sounds of him trying to clear his nose and throat for over an hour because his meth supposedly gets laced with washing powder or something. I don't care what anyone needs to cope with life and shit but if you're a person who doesn't gets his shit straight, then by all means, don't be surprised people get pissed because of you. And 2025 will be the year the stakes are higher than before. M ypatience is running thin, same goes for my energy.
Since there weren't much cyberpunked copyright free music tracks released this year, I began to experiment with Ai music. Maybe some of you may boo me for this but as a solo dev I look for ways to keep my budget in check. Besides copyright free music doesn't mean it can be used anywhere. Nope, there are musicians that still put other terms for usage for their tracks. Not everyone is happy knowing that there are more or less questionable avenues using their music for their work. As said the few tracks the Ai made for me are still pretty rough and need more refinement before they're good enough to be added to Cyberlinxxx. The expanded monthly pictorials seem to be liked very much by my community. so they will stay. But the bigger monthly cyberpet pictorials and runner-ups do need their days to make. As of Feb 2025 those get limited to 6 images each, if there are results justifying a pictorial with two contestants plus something like 4 renders with the winner and runner-up in them. I need that rule for me to not go overboard with the scenery and time put into it. As talked about a few months ago, A-Z will be converted to G8, so I can use a wider range of assets for her, just like Cary-June will looking different, for the same reasons. Which probably means I have to rerender the images in her earlier appearance as well at one point. it will be worth it, even if she doesn't get much love by my community. I love her and that's why she stays ^^. Last year was just tiny baby steps and the feeling of not getting anywhere has been exhausting. That's why I'm looking forward to the visual novel festival in march on Steam. Some points of success would be nice this year. New update will be out before it begins.
Other things in 2025 that could be good: Enshrouded getting a full release. Gothic Remake coming out in spring(hopefully) and Subnautica 2 in EA. A new dishwashing machine. My first tax refund. Yay! And NOT buying any of the Nvidia GPU's. There were many more topics that affected 2024 but this is a long enough read anyway. Thanks again for accompanying me on this journey and all the power to you. Let's hope the absurdity levels won't skyrocket this year ^^ Have a great day! I got no cat but here's some Zandratax.