Focus - Update 05/30/2022

Hey ya'll! Hope you're doing well ^^

Gonna start off by apologizing for not posting an update last month. I can promise that I have been hard at work on Marble Nest, as well as the various projects that will come after. Additionally, I want to apologize for failing to put together that 'making of' post I promised last time. I have not forgotten about it at all and did in fact attempt to write it multiple times but, as well see in a minute, it became a bit of an ordeal for me. No matter what though, I regret not being able to make that happen in the time frame I originally promised.

Now, this is gonna be a bit of a long one, so we'll just start off with the tl;dr up top:

-A preview of the first two acts of The Marble Nest, For Those Who Will Never Play It will be available for $3+ immediately after this post goes up. It's a little sparse at the moment due to missing lines, but the foundation is there.

-Marble Nest is coming along really well overall, but had to undergo an extensive second draft after feedback and has been slightly bottlenecked as I wait for lines from our various collaborators. This is also why I didn't post an update or preview last month. Confident about a July release though. 

-Good news: I have received about 90% of the lines that will be getting added to the Director's Cut of the Bachelor's Route. I will be posting a small preview compilation of what those new conversations will be looking like early next month.

-The 'Making of' post I promised last time will be getting posted in the first week of next month.

-I was officially diagnosed with ADHD as of two weeks ago and have begun receiving medication for it. Consequently, my mental health has skyrocketed and progress on all projects has become significantly more consistent.

-As a result of the slow down, I've been working on scripts for Morrowind and Shadow Hearts: Covenant in the mean time since even I have my limit for how much Pathologic I can stomach before it starts to consume me, in the bad way.

-That said, I am also slowly but surely working on the Haruspex script so that's ready to go when the time comes.

-I've officially begun streaming again over on Twitch. Will be going live every Thursday and Saturday at 5PM EST for the foreseeable future. 

-Thank you all for your patience through this, you guys are the absolute best

Now, with ALL that said, let's get into some more fine detail for what's been going on for those who'd like to hear it.

First and foremost as always, Pathologic. The unambiguously good news is that I've received every new set of lines that I'll be adding to the Director's Cut save one. This means that the Director's Cut is will basically be good to go as soon as I get the chance to step away from Marble Nest for a moment and edit in the new scenes and swap out my old, deadname avatar for my new, much sexier one. I'm also very happy to announce that I took the chance to commission the incredibly talented Max Banshees to create a thumbnail for The Marble Nest with original artwork and they absolutely knocked it out of the park.

I may have made the textless version the wallpaper for one of my monitors. Mildly obsessed with it, think it really captures the spirit of the game and I could not be happier with how it turned out.

Overall, The Marble Nest is coming together well, as evidenced by the new preview. The script is now set in stone, all collaborators have been contacted, and editing is coming together very quickly. At this point, it's mostly a matter of just putting together the things I have as I patiently wait for all our fine performers to turn in their lines. The big downside of a project like this though is that, until I have at least a majority of those lines, I can't help but feel that any previews I put out will end up being feeling sparse and nowhere near as exciting to watch as the actual final product will be. 

This is why I chose not to post a preview last month despite having a sizable chunk of edited footage: Without the dialogue, the previews are not only distinctly incomplete, but flatly unrepresentative, and last month I didn't have any dialogue at all. That said, I know I can't always pick and choose with these kinds of milestones, and that I owe you all proof that progress is in fact being made. So, with that in mind, while I am incredibly proud of how it's coming together as a whole, I would also humbly ask that you keep in mind that it is still much rougher than I would typically like my previews to be.

Additionally, I also do have to say that The Marble Nest script has undergone some pretty extensive rewrites since the previous update.  After the last post, I handed the script to a few friends/peers for feedback before I began production proper and the general consensus I got back from everyone was that, while the main show was great, the pacing of the opening recommending Pathologic 2 was a bit of a nightmare. 

By all accounts, the actual prose of the recommendation was great and snappy, but that didn't change that it was 16 very dense pages that would have translated into easily 40+ minutes of video when recorded and edited which would have then been happening entirely before the story that people were actually be showing up for even began. No matter how I tried to pitch it to anyone or myself, it became increasingly clear that starting with that much preamble was a formula for disaster. Worst of all though, I realized that, in spite of the already considerable length of the section, there was still A LOT I felt was important to say about what makes it specially and why I feel so strongly that people NEED to play it.

So I ripped it out. As I talked about last time, sometimes it's important to know when to kill your darlings and this was one of the hardest ones I've ever had to put down. This was honestly kind of heartbreaking to me because I was (and am) really proud of what I put together for it. Fortunately though, this one still has a lot of life in it.

To be clear, I did not simply trash all that writing. Rather, it's my current plan to work on it as it's own standalone video, one that will likely get posted as a companion to the first Act of the Haruspex's Route when the time comes. In the meantime though, if you'd like to see what that section looked like, you can find it here. 

The big downside though is that this required a pretty extensive rewrite of the opening of the Marble Nest video, as well as a rewrite of certain elements of the script which were previously written with the ability to safely assume that the audience would have at least a baseline level of understanding around Pathologic 2. Unfortunately, this rewrite became a bit of a Thing.

Parallel to this, I was attempting to write the Making Of post that I had promised in the last update, emphasis on *attempting*. As we'll see, it became a bit of a snowball moment for me. The problems with it initially started I was forced to do a fresh install of Windows after my computer randomly began to Blue Screen on boot. Fortunately, I didn't loose anything of value in the process, but it did mean that certain important things got moved around in a way that Premiere Pro really seemed to just not like. Consequently, a lot of the source media (audio, images, footage, etc.) were unlinked from the project file and, for what ever reason, was only letting me relink them one item at a time. Given that there are hundreds upon hundreds of files in that project, this was a problem that I could tell was fixable, but would take time. It also meant that that putting together any sort of post that required showing off the file had just become substantially harder.

However, I'd be lying if I said this was the biggest thing that prevented it that post from seeing the light of day. Fact is that I could have written around it based on memory, I still know this project inside and out after all. It wasn't the real problem. The fact of the matter is that, no matter how hard I tried, I just... couldn't. Or, perhaps more accurately, my brain just wouldn't. I tried to multiple times and, in fact, there was a day where I spent around 3 hours just staring at a blank google doc trying bring myself to start it, but every time I tried my brain went equally as blank. 

The simple fact is that I couldn't stay focused on it long enough to make any head way no matter how hard I tried, especially once I realized I was going to have to give the Marble Nest script another draft. But this ironically meant that I ended up spending a lot of time struggling to focus on the Marble Nest rewrite, because 'I should be working on the making of' post. So I'd sit down to write that and 'I should be working on the Marble Nest script, that's the important project'. So I'd sit down to work on that and rinse and repeat till I threw my arms up and just started recording the finished parts I was already confident about which was then made all the much more difficult because 'I know I should be writing' and I'm sure you can see now how this spiraled until I hit a bit of a breaking point where I could tell that there was just something fundamentally wrong going on here.

I'll spare you the fine details on this and this alone, but suffice to say that I finally just stepped back and realized I needed to get some professional help to get my head in order. So I got it, and long story short, I was officially diagnosed with ADHD. Wasn't exactly a shock to me as it was something I've long suspected that I had, but the confirmation has been nice. Even nicer though has been the treatment. I was lucky enough to receive a prescription to help manage the symptoms and I literally cannot stress enough the unbelievable difference they have already made in the relatively short time I've had them. 

For the first time in as long as I can remember, I feel like I actually have the ability to choose what I want to do and when I want to do it. I've been able to effortlessly do tasks in hours that previously took me days. In the past couple weeks I've been more stable, more productive, and more focused than I think I may have ever been. Most surprisingly and welcome though is that the panic attacks I've been talking about since the beginning of the year just absolutely vanished over night. I have never felt more at ease. It has been a godsend.

My focus has improved so much that I've been able to write this entire post in a single sitting without getting distracted by anything else even once. That might not sound like much to some, but it's a dream come true for me.

I literally spent such a long and uninterrupted period of time writing this post that Patreon stopped me to force me to do a captcha and prove that I wasn't a bot. I didn't even know that was a thing. Dear god.

I may talk more about my experience with ADHD if people would care to hear it, but it's no exaggeration to say that I'm now in a better place that I have been in a long, long time, and the improved mental health and focus has been translating over into everything else. As mentioned, I've since gotten the Marble Nest script officially squared away again and was able to begin making real progress on the Making Of post in between recording and editing the Marble Nest video, all while taking some time here and there to decompress by working on scripts for the projects that I'm planning next as a way to make sure I don't overload myself too much with that trademark Pathologic Misery.

On that note, I'm happy to say that I've begun serious work on the script for Morrowind, For Those Who Will Never Play It. It's been a real struggle trying to figure out what quests to focus on, what factions to run through, what order to do them all in, etc. For reasons that will be self-evident to anyone who's played any Elder Scrolls game, trying to wrangle the story of any TES game into coherent linear narrative is messy undertaking, but I believe I've finally got a clear picture of what I want it to look like, so I'm looking forward to pouring my all energy into that as soon as I have Marble Nest and the Director's Cut squared away. As always, my goal isn't inherently to give a hyper-completionist break down of EVERYTHING in the game, but moreso to capture what it feels like to play through moment to moment while breaking down the most important themes and storytelling elements as best I can. Fortunately, I'm confidant that Morrowind is a game that will lend itself exceptionally well to that kind of approach.

I've also been slowly but surely working on a very personal pet project that I've been wanting to work on for literal years. It's a longform video on something I've been eager to talk about basically since I started the channel, but was also deeply nervous about because the game in question is one that is deeply important to me, but so obscure that I knew I'd only have one real shot to show people what makes it so special. For those of you who have followed my channel (or just read the tl;dr), you likely already know what game I'm alluding to: Shadow Hearts: Covenant.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant is a turn-based JRPG released in 2004 set in an alternate reality version of World War 1. It is a game that is both wildly original and well-crafted, as well as being almost entirely unknown in both Japan and the west much to my dismay. Despite it's obscurity though, this is a title that has been in my Top 10 since I played it as a teenage which I still revisit on an almost annual basis and fall in love with a bit more every time I play. It has my favorite combat system in any JRPG, a fantastically penned script that is brimming with both meaningful themes, rich characterization, and genuine humor, and, perhaps most of all, the most buckwild cast and plot that I've ever seen in any game even now.

My favorite thing about the game is the more I describe it, the faker it inevitably sounds. Princess Anastasia is a playable party member. So is Gepetto. There is a vampire luchador who is mentored by The Great Gama and moonlights as a superhero vigilante. Roger Bacon give us an airship. There's a metal gear style stealth section where you play as a dog. Rasputin uses the power of Asmodeus to summon a sky palace over Petrograd. This isn't even scratching the surface for how unhinged this gets and I NEED to share it with the world.

I still haven't decided whether or not I'm going to release it as a 'For Those Who Will Never Play It' as it doesn't lend itself to the same kind of immersive, first person storytelling that Pathologic and Morrowind do, but that'll be something to feel out later. For now though, I can say with complete certainty that I have committed to finally making the longform video about it that I've always wanted and will be a welcome respite to the emotional and political complexity/bleakness I've been so creatively immersed in lately, so that will likely be something that happens in parallel to Morrowind when the time comes.

I should also note that, as I've been doing editing, prep, footage capture, replays, etc. for all of these projects, I've also simultaneously been doing research into various Russian/Soviet theatrical history and figures in anticipation of the Haruspex's Route by listening to relevant audiobooks, documentaries, and of course checking out productions of key plays to the movement. I don't wanna give too much away about what aspect I'll be focusing in on for Act 1 quite yet, but we'll just say that you should probably expect me to talk about Anton Chekov a lot. If all of these projects sound like a bit much, trust me when I say that I still very much have my eyes on the real prize.

Last but not least, happy to announce that I have also begin streaming again over on my Twitch channel! Currently I'm planning on streaming a playthrough of the Main Scenario Quest of Final Fantasy XIV alongside my good friend Foxcade every Thursday at 5PM EST. Meanwhile, I've also begun a playing through the entire Soulsborne series starting of course with Dark Souls 1. That will be happening every Saturday for the foreseeable future, also at 5PM EST. I've also got plans for a special Pathologic stream in the future, but gonna hold off until after Marble Nest for that.

I know these videos can take a long time to come together which results in some massive droughts in content, so I figure relatively short but consistent streams like these might be a good way to hang out with both viewers and fellow creators while making sure I'm not just repeatedly vanishing for months on end, especially given how much fun they've been so far. 

And with that, I think we've finally covered everything. I know I say this at the end of these posts a lot, but sincerely, even more so than usual, thank you all so, so much for the support and patience. I would not have been able to get to this point of stability and consistency without it and it means the world. I promise that I'll be sure to repay it in spades.

Making of the Bachelor's Route next week. Director's Cut sneak peek the week after that. New Marble Nest preview at the end of the month, likely with entire main show + intro.

See ya'll again real soon~

Ruby 💕✨