Category: Blog

If 2023 was a new leaf for me, then 2024 was a year of tying up loose ends. I started off 2024 with multiple unfinished projects that needed wrapping up—more than I like having open at any time.

Canvas Menagerie was entering its 2nd year of development, I was in the midst of finishing Asphodelium—which was supposed to be a Winter Jam 2023 project—and a separate Winter Jam 2022 project, Lost Lune, that only had a partial amount of progress made on it. Suffice to say, I was somewhat in over my head with unfinished games.

I’m the type that is self motivated while working, but I can get overwhelmed when I have several projects in progress (including game dev, marketing, IRL, etc). So, clearly I needed to actually finish some things, even though my games were just hobby projects.

…But, I also had to start some new projects. An idea I’ve had for a while was an otome sequel to Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea, something I told myself I wouldn’t make unless I could get a writer and artist to help me with it. Well, guess what my Otome Jam 2024 project was…

In February I set up a new side website—Arimia’s Doujin Den! It’s a little blog for me to share the doujin fan games I’ve collected over the years, many of which no longer have any internet presence at all. It takes a lot of passion and dedication to make an indie game but maybe even a touch more for a fan game, and I don’t want that passion to go to waste. I’ve only catalogued a few so far, but I want to do even more in the future.

However, about halfway through 2024 I was laid off from my software development job very suddenly. I was partially expecting for months to be laid off at any point as the company has lay offs every single month, but it was still incredibly sudden. I had hoped to at least make it through to the end of the year, not only half the year!

I also began doing social media work for Studio Everium, an indie otome studio. I’ve only ever worked at Studio Élan for marketing (and this marks my 5th year there!) so it’s been a fun change of pace to help share even more visual novels to the world. Speaking of Élan, I spent a few weekends this year traveling and attending conventions! We had booths at Offkai Expo and Otakon, where we sold our yuri games and met a lot of fans & fellow developers. It was my first time going to a convention outside of Memphis and was so fun to finally meet so many friends (and make new ones).

At the tail end of the year, I finished rereading Umineko in October (on the 5th, of course), which I hadn’t read since….middle school. It was such a refreshing reread, to not only read something made with so much love for the world but also to confirm that it was just as good—even better, with fresh eyes on the queer narrative—than I remembered. Anyway, that’s what led me to get back into reading novels. I wanted to see some of r07’s inspiration for it, so I picked up And Then There Were None and dived into several other of Christie’s tales, which led me to joining an in-person book club (where all of the members could be my parents/grandparents…!) to force myself to get out more.

2023 has come and gone—it feels like it was just a week ago that my grandma was complaining that Thanksgiving and Christmas were too close together, and now it’s January. I spent the last 2 weeks of 2023 sick (I still am), which made it go by like a blur.

2022 was a fresh slate for me, with a new job, a new home, and new projects. 2023 was a year of finding a new rhythm—figuring out how I work best and molding my work time around that rather than trying to make myself go against the flow.

Working from home is truly a blessing and a curse. I do think that it has more positives than negatives (especially right now as I’m able to work while being sick and don’t have to take time off), but navigating around the negatives is tricky. The main problem I’ve faced, aside from lack of interaction with non-family, is that it’s harder for me to focus on work when I end up spending almost all of my awake hours at my desk, either for my fulltime job or for VN development or for relaxing.

I’ve had to mix things up, usually taking my laptop to other parts of the house or even working outside of home some days. Even if it’s only for a few hours, it helps reset the fatigue of being at my desk all day every day. It doesn’t always work, and one problem I ran into for most of the year was being unable to focus on writing. Art and scripting are more “mindless” for me, I can do them with a video or voice call in the background, but writing is something I’ve always struggled to concentrate on.

This year was my first year attempting NaNoWriMo, though a more casual version of it. A few other devs were also entering NaNoWriMo to work on their projects so I hopped on too. I wanted to use the hype of the event to push myself to focus on writing, and it worked! My goal was to hit 30k total words in the month across multiple projects—which is about what I write in half a year—and I hit it.

2022 has come and gone before I even realized it. It’s still December, right?!

Looking back on 2022, in order to actually review it I have to go back to 2021 to see how the stage was set…