itch.io

Thank you! And, I'm doing much better these days.

This project was a distillation of my life, my struggle trying to resolve the absurdity of making things in this upside-down world, and my feelings as my field and communities turned to slop. Also, a lot of it is projecting my trauma from my short lived software development career in 2022. 

I got chewed up pretty badly by a hellish start up as my first job (a start up that would close down a few years after I left). It left me out of work for years. I struggled to find a job with a huge gap in my resume. AI was just starting to take off and make searching for work feel impossible.

My career lasted merely 11 months. I never got something long and storied to reflected on. Just fizzling out with a whimper. The hardest part of this was abandoning a years long project (Chitinous Carnival) cause I just couldn't keep pushing it forwards. I was running out of money and needed a steady job instead of something that could vanish any second.

I eventually found that new job in a new field, but it was rough. This project was started after I implode pretty badly. It was a whirl wind of just everything hitting me all at once. 

The first parts of this game I wrote out was The Boss's final interaction with you. I was very much in a bad place. Just raw unfiltered anger and wanting to capture the blood thirsty mindset I saw coming from the world of AI.

The happy ending was something that came after shelving this projects for several months. It was nice coming back to it with fresh eyes (and also months of therapy). It was rather satisfying ending this whole piece with "they got what they wanted. they'll get what they get". It's been my feelings as I watch the industry cannibalize itself: they got what the wanted (cheep labor), they'll get what they get (even more broken and unmaintainable code, burn out, skill lose, etc. etc).

But, I'll still be here. Despite the best efforts of many people, I'll still be coding things for myself, for the fun of interacting with a computer, for the arts and crafts. And when it's all ashes, I'll be here to press it into a pencil for my next bit of art.