Disclaimer: tech stuff and emotional feelings throughout. You have been warned!
I released a small prototype today - https://gorbles.itch.io/honeycomb-alpha - made entirely in Java with no libraries beyond the JRE.
The splash page for itch.io
This is a bit of a milestone, as simplistic and crude as the prototype is. I can create far better UI graphics by overriding Swing code (part of the JRE, still), or even in GIMP. I can make better ingame graphics the same way. I can do low-poly 3D models, and I'm familiar with older versions of the Unity Engine (Unreal still daunts me a bit). I can do bits of everything, really, a something-lower-than-a-jack of many trades. But this prototype is important, because I took a basic concept (hey let's make hexagons in Java) and I drove it to completion as well as managing to form a game out of it.
The game was unintentional, you see. I was just playing around generating sequences of hexagons that would line up nicely and spin when you hover over them (as well as the usual thing of highlights and lowlights when clicking / unclicking them). After X iterations and testing I came across a bug where all previous highlights up to Y were being kept, so I had a kinda mouse trail of highlighted hexagons. I fixed the bug, but the bug got me thinking.
"this is a way to select them easily"
This is another bug that happened
It took a lot more than that to create a draggable mode of selection, but that isn't important. Inspiration struck, I seized it, and now I have a small game that actually works how I want it to. How does this relate to anxiety, right?
Anxiety's a bit of an odd one. It can be a medical condition to the best of my knowledge, and it can just be that thing that controls your nerves before you do something you're not entirely comfortable with. It relates to how I feel a lot of the time, as good as I am at covering it up. Make a post about programming? Anxious, yes. Dealing with a problematic client? Gods, yes. Bathing the kittens? You get the point.
But this game, this little, ultimately-insignificant event, triggered more anxiety in me than most things I've felt recently. Possibly due to me not feeling much of anything recently? Personal events, family events. They hurt, and I'm dealing with them. But they come with a form of numbness. This game kinda broke that to an extent - and that's a good thing! I think. When I'm not feeling anxious, haha.
What criticism will I get? Will I get any criticism? Will anybody actually pay attention? Who knows? Who knows anything, really.
I'll probably feel a lot more reasonable tomorrow, when the nerves calm down. Or when I eventually pull myself out of this funk I've been in for the past couple of months. I have the energy to program again, now, which is fantastic. A really good feeling. And this is what I have created with that energy - more positivity.
I think the thing that makes me more anxious, really, is the realisation that I can actually complete things. I have less excuses to rely on, now. The more you know, eh?
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