The Struggle, and the Breakthrough

As most of you know, the past half year has been abject hell for me. I'm not saying this for sympathy, just explaining. This next update is gonna take a while, because I have been struggling with a mental block.

You see, I had a relationship end in August of last year, while I was dealing with my uncle and father being diagnosed with terminal cancer and my grandmother, other uncle, and myself catching COVID. As many of you know, my grandmother, who raised me, and my father both passed on the same day. Despite all this, the person I had been seeing blamed the amount of time I was spending on working on the game as the cause for the relationship failing. This was new to me, as I had told her she could always ask for more attention if she needed it. And she never mentioned the game was a problem. It was a really hard breakup for me because I was very, very into this person, and I developed a mental block when it came to working on the game. Where once I had felt excitement, passion, and eagerness to get updates out to you all and hear the feedback you had, I now felt this void of blankness and worry. I decided I needed to get some work done. The months were passing, and my Patreon was bleeding members. So I sat down.

And I couldn't write a single fucking word.

I was stunned. I sat there all night at work looking at The Blank Page. It had soundly defeated me.

I tried again the next night. Same shit. I started panicking. If I can't write, I can't make the game. If I can't make the game, I'll continue to lose Patrons. And if that continues, I have to go back to working a lot more than I want. Back to being a slave to the system. Back to overtime and not having a life anymore.

So I told myself to stop freaking out and calm down. Pressure doesn't help creativity. Rather the opposite, it harms creativity. Y'all have been wonderfully patient with me through what has perhaps been the darkest time in my life, and the community at large has shown to be much the same. I may lose some Patrons, but this game is averaging 300 views and I think 60+ downloads a day, and more people give fresh feedback and see the Patreon page every day, so it's not going to be the disaster I anticipated.

On and on, The Blank Page continued to torment me. I think I secretly feared that, now that the game had been soundly condemned, I was doomed to repeat history if I went back to it. Alone, the game sat. Until yesterday.

But the reason I'm writing this is because I sat down yesterday, put some music on, and actually got some writing done. I broke the mental block. We're moving forward again. Chapter 6 is now in progress.

Thank you all for your support and patience. As I finally start getting to a place where this last blunder of mine is further and further from my mind, I find I'm enjoying the thought of WCA again, and the more I enjoy it, the better the content will be.

Thank you again. Love you fuckers.

-Vic