My (Mental) Life and How It Is Falling Apart: a Rant and History

Let me start this by just saying that I really hate my mind… It's been a pain for many years now but it just gets worse and WORSE. (I really won't ever understand how someone's own mind is this self-destructive and unstoppable!)

Please read this, as it'll tell you the history of my frustrating mind and how it's nearly completely ruined my life mentally.

🫠 HISTORY OF THE ANNOYANCE 🫠

Back in “the Michael years”, my mind tried various methods to mess with me, whether it's trying to annoy or worry me. Though it tried many things (rendering scissors trying to cut my eyes, making me think that blinking and other automatic functions wouldn't happen, and even forcing me to see the weird, distorted faces of crying infants), it eventually settled on one method, somehow creating its own itches.

Again, somehow, it can rapidly “poke” at the same area of my skin, making it sensitive, then from there can somehow create a pulse that grabs my attention, for seemingly no good reason and for unknown gains. For proof these are not “the thousands of itches you naturally get a day”, they usually always appear wherever my mind forces me to focus on a split second before it happens. Also, they're suspiciously absent when initially waking up from any dream. If they were “natural”, wouldn't they be there immediately?

Anyways, let's get back to the history of this annoyance. After we made it out of those endless motels, we lived with other people for some time after that. With the daily worries of hotel life and possibly becoming homeless home, my mind reverted back to its annoying behavior.

I started fighting back at this point; I had enough of it endlessly poking at me instead of letting me be productive and concentrate like any other human being can. (Ah, the curse of having a “intelligent mind”…) The instant itch thoughts are basically impossible to prevent, being “out of reach” mentally, so while I initially kept quickly looking at something in whatever room I was in or trying to force my focus to shift, I later resorted to forcibly blocking my mind from thinking about ANYTHING by somehow pushing on my forehead mentally (but not physically), known as “fogging” my mind.

⚰️ THE DEATH OF MY BRAIN ⚰️

After moving into our camper for a couple months, I decided that enough was enough, and began aggressively trying to stop the itches using that method. I assumed that at worst, this would only cause a BIT of mental destruction, nothing major, so I began to fog the mind constantly, holding off the onslaught of itches.

Over time, I noticed the itches became a bit less of a frequent occurrence, and at times I could actually relax without that unnecessary constant poking. Sure, my mind was getting foggier, but the brief peace was more worth it to me.

On the other hand, things were also getting worse in my brain… I noticed my mind wouldn't automatically think of things anymore, instead only thinking about a lot of things if something that I heard or saw triggered an impulse that led to the next thought/bit of data in my head.

That alone is a massive downgrade, limiting my vocabulary and ideas to a minimum. This has also caused me to basically forget what memories remained in my mind of my younger better years and bits of knowledge, as now barely anything comes to mind automatically anymore!

Do you want to know the worst part about all of this? The itches are still surviving. Yep, that's right; Despite more important parts of my mind being so foggy that even a flood light wouldn't pierce it, it still knows how to make those annoying itches, the only reason why I did that risky crap in the first place. Also, even if I fog my mind and escape the itches for the night, they're back the next morning, but my increased fog remains! This world feels like it works in reverse from how it should in many ways, and let me say this is one of them; If I fog my mind to get rid of an annoyance, that problem should be the main thing that gets affected by it, not the only part that survives my counter-attack.

This and the next problem might not sound like much to you, but believe me, I feel these  mental problems are ruining my one life, and it's amazing that your own mind can destroy everything this easily.

🥱 RUINING SLEEP 🥱

For the longest time, I haven't been able to sleep like a normal human (though my ideas of an ideal human may be tainted by fictional media like games and cartoons that usually show people sleeping perfectly from night until morning). The first time that I would fall asleep, I'd sleep for like 3 hours or so, but any additional attempts to sleep would only give me an hour at a time.

That's already pretty messed up and inconvenient, but it's even worse when you realize that every single time that I wake up, I'm at the mercy of my stupidly annoying mind potentially creating itches to force me awake! (That happened this morning and I've been awake since 8:20AM because of it!)

Since the mental fogginess has gotten pretty thick, now it's even affecting my ability to sleep; Gone is the initial 3-hour sleep, as now seemingly every attempt at sleeping is merely an hour-long nap!

Additionally, even THAT is worse now, as very often, I can only stay asleep for less than an hour, like 30 minutes at a time! This leaves me vulnerable to those dumb itches even more often, and can lead to be being forced to stay awake earlier; Once I've slept enough times, my mind becomes aware of it and starts trying to wake me up. (I'm starting to wish I could take prescriptions that forcibly knock me out with no option to stay awake; That's how hard it is to return to sleep!)

😔 CONCLUSION 😔

I worried about a lot of things in my earliest Facebook posts but those were child's play when compared to this mind-threatening problem that's taking over me… At last back then I had more brain cells left, and could think of ideas reliably, even with the small amount of natural mental fog that I already had before the fight began.

I took it all for granted, and somehow didn't think it would get this bad. Let this be a warning to you, the person reading this; Don't think that you can escape your mental annoyances by trying to block all thoughts, through self-fogging or another method; It may screw you over for life like me, and once you make the mistake, you'll never get back the intelligence that this will take from you.

I think I deserve a second chance, and should have my former mental health come back to me, with my acknowledgement that I made a terrible mistake and shouldn't attempt that again; Sure, my mind won't let me work or concentrate like I should be allowed to, but at least then I would be able to think again instead of fearing that I'm getting amnesia at least and at worst that I'm gradually forgetting everything like an elder, and I'm only 27!

Magical Mary - A Necessary Redesign

 Well, well, well… It looks like I've neglected this blog for almost a year now! Sorry, everyone that is checking this, hoping for new posts, but I just haven't felt like writing any blog posts due to…laziness, I guess. That and my mind's recent obsession with creating its own itches constantly, and my throat's inevitable destruction.

Although it's been months since it was done, I have an announcement: Mary has a new, 3D design! Let's take a look at her third design iteration!

The Great Refactoring of 2021

How's Magical Mary going? Well, I think this picture says it all; There's not much anymore...

Oh, wow... I really suck at ensuring things are up to date, aren't I? I mean, just visit the official Magical Mary 1 YouTube channel and you'll see the severe lack of any update videos, which is mainly due to the higher standard of quality that is expected of YouTube videos compared to the quick, short, and easy videos uploaded to the Facebook and Instagram🆕 pages.

Still, despite the silence, there's still ongoing development and updates being made to the game! It just isn't the most exciting thing to show in pictures since it basically required all of the existing levels to be thrown out; Right now, there's only a very simple test level with ramps, raised blocks, and water. I can still talk about the cool recent updates in this blog post, so let's get to that right now!

The Fears of an Ambitious Indie Developer

Whoa, this blog hasn't been updated in months now! With that last blog post, you might've assumed I went insane due to fears of color association or something. Well, despite a certain infamous game's "gremlins" showing me how dumb this world can be with restrictions and morals (which kinda discourages me), I haven't disappeared...though I now have fears that if Magical Mary were to become popular, that people would scrutinize every line of my code and hate me for the slightest offense, though people should be more open to others in my opinion.

My recent (real) fears and frustrations with people aside, Magical Mary's development has definitely slowed down, and this blog post will explain my mind's ideas of plans that are way too massive to go through with...

My Recent Controversial Fears

Oh, this is going to be a strange post. Back in 2012, I wrote a post on my old Typepad blog stating I really didn't like dark-skinned people and wished I could talk bad about them without being potentially banned from websites, which you can read here. Things have changed since then, as I'm now okay with them, and in some cases actually wish there were more of them (especially in anime)... I even added a dark-skinned girl to my game, Princess Peppermint! (Before then, the only dark-skinned person I made was Michael North from Shushybye, so this was my first OC "of color"!)

Now, however, with things changing in the world about sexual orientation and gender, new fears have come to mind, and no, they aren't about men trying to fall in love with me. That was an old fear. Read on, if you can, but please respect my opinions on this stuff. I know how touchy people are on the internet now, not being willing to acknowledge that other people have different opinions than them.

These flags... They've been around for many years,but I've recently thought about how people on the internet behave, and how they have a weird tendency to come up with beliefs about characters' orientations and/or genders, or how they can associate characters with said things just by seeing them wear those flag color schemes.

Sylveon proves boys can be cuties too...

I think I first saw this with Sylveon in Pokemon X & Y. This really cute Eeveelution looks very girly, but technically is male most of the time. It also has a pink and blue color scheme, like a certain flag. These two things lead to it being linked to transgender, though in this case, I can't blame them for thinking this. I suspicion whether Game Freak did that on purpose. The other case that comes to mind is one of Speeps Highway's pictures, showing Amy Rose wearing the trans flag colors. That isn't as big as the Sylveon example, though.

Now, why am I worried about this? Well, my mind tends to come up with "what if" scenarios, making me worry about the possibility of anything happening in the future, like these:

• "What if Mary accidentally wears that color scheme, leading to people thinking she supports trans rights?"
• "What if people see that color scheme in a building and think I did that on purpose, supporting it as a creator?" (I'm in the middle about that, to clarify.)
• "What if people notice the logo uses purple and yellow just like the non-binary flag and start assuming my game has anything to do with not being male or female?"
• (And the most random,) "What if people see adult characters in my game's world and start making their own LGBT head-canon about them, leading to the community accepting that non-canon claim?"

Those seem like random, nonsensical worries, but I've seen how people who are fans of a series can be like. They could come up with their own theories and the like, but I wouldn't be able to tell them the truth. When someone isn't in full support of something, like LGBTQ, non-binary, or even common moral stuff (especially relating to children for some reason), they will dislike you at best, and go out of their way to hate you at every chance they get at worst, even when, no matter how bad it is, it's their beliefs, and they should still be respected, no matter how disgusting it may be thought of.

With that said, I bet if I got into one of these situations, I would be basically in trouble. I'm from the mid-90's, back when things like this weren't on the front lines. They still existed, as I knew someone that swapped genders. However, due to it not being that big back then, I'm just used to straightness, loving the opposite gender, staying yourself, being 100% male/female, etc. However, now people are bending lines, breaking boundaries.

Due to how I've been all my life, I prefer to stay that way, so my game is made with straightness only. If I ever told someone in my game's fan-base that none of the game's meant to be LGBTQ, and that I'm not in full support, just neutral, they could go against me and cause unnecessary drama, at worst causing everyone to go against my game, refuse to support me financially, stop giving money monthly (if I ever open that Patreon), and cause me to hit rock bottom with nowhere to go.

It's a scary thought, but it shows how much power consumers have. I hope you didn't get offended by this blog post, but I felt all of this had to be said, in case any of it would happen in the future. Remember, I'm not against it, but I'm not with any of it, either. I might not understand it all, and I'm not putting it into my game's canonical world, either, but again, I'm not going to say I'm against it...

This answer on jelloapocalypse's Tumblr blog sums part of this post up, just not the parts about color association:

That’s not to say that headcanons are never a good call, but when it comes to character sexuality and gender, I always think it’s weird to mentally assign someone a sexuality or gender that they canonically aren’t. It feels weird and regressive to me. You don’t get to decide what you want a character’s gender or sexuality. The character does. I’ve gotten flak for this stance before, but  I think “headcanoning” any character as any sexuality they aren’t is equally weird, no matter which way you do it. It’s weird to think of a straight character as bi, a bi character as gay, a gay character as ace, an ace character as straight, etc. All bad.

With this "rant" out of the way, all I can say is, regardless of your orientations and stuff, look forward to Mary's Magical Adventure!

Branching Out: the Growth in Tree Quality

Ah, trees... Believe it or not, they've been in Mary's Magical Adventure since its development began, in World of Kirbycraft v0.75! There's some cool things to talk about that I've been developing just within the last couple days, but first, let me tell you a story about the history of these leafy things...

(This post has an AI-generated voice reading video available. To hear it, play this video and read along!)

Out of Place Cutouts

In the beginning, trees were pretty basic. In fact, they were just like the trees in Doom, a game from over 20 years ago at this point! Just like in that game, they were paper-thin images that rotated to face you. The only thing that made these trees unique was the code ran upon each tree spawning, which gave it a random tree image. I would say these trees were fine, but really, there were two problems with them...

Ripped from Reality

World of Kirbycraft, even back in those days when the game looked pretty bad, still had some form of a cartoony "art style" in it. These trees completely contradicted that, looking like pictures of real trees cut out and glued to the ground, like the game's world is just something a kid and their parent threw together by cutting out pages of magazines... I don't believe I was going for that style, but looking back, it's like looking at early 3D games that intended to look realistic. They were fine then, but now look like a joke compared to unrealistic games.

No Originality

You may think I was just experimenting, seeing what worked and what didn't, but no. I started development of World of Kirbycraft while I was still making Doom II: The Monster Invasion's last iteration (which in my opinion was the worst).

When I needed things like objects and code, I'd grab it from that mod and slap it into World of Kirbycraft, and that's exactly what happened with the trees and grass.

While the "realistic" trees worked mostly fine in Doom II: The Monster Invasion, they completely clashed with World of Kirbycraft's style. Unfortunately, I didn't know any better until years later...

The Crappy Image Legacy

In World of Kirbycraft v1.4, Hell City was introduced. As it was a complete ripoff of Kirby Air Ride's City Trial map, one area was a forest with many trees. Predictably, those were the same exact trees used in every previous version. There's not much to say other than just how out of place they still look.

Just when World of Kirbycraft got renamed to Mary's Magical Adventure in v1.6, the trees were thankfully changed to use better images. Mind you, they still didn't completely fit, but were more cartoony. The best one was the one on the right in the screenshot above, which came from a Terry WAD. It was just too pretty of a tree sprite for me to let it get wasted in a stupid waste of time like that!

Despite getting these new, better images, unfortunately these trees were only used in two places:

• Hell City's island - In the park
• City Street Run - Around road corners

Apologies for the short section, but I really thought I did more with these better trees. However, neither version can beat what I've done to the trees lately!

The Perfect Trim

Am I...seeing things? Are these really 3D? Nature finally looks right!

When Mary's Magical Adventure's next version is released, oh, are people in for a massive tree upgrade! For once, trees actually feel like they belong in the game's world, with more 3D, detailed designs that are actually interactive! Let's show what makes these new trees really cool, one point at a time!

"3D Graphics!"

Only a video could do this justice, so...just watch this video of both new trees and admire how 3D and believable they are now. Don't question the weird music, I like messing with Guitar Hero songs' individual channels.

Yes, you're not seeing things. Mary's Magical Adventure's trees are made like more modern games now; The tree itself is a 3D (voxel) model and 2D leaf cluster sprites are placed on top of parts of it, giving it a 3D look voxels alone couldn't give. This is seemingly the same thing a lot of games do for trees, like Oblivion and Sims 3(?), bringing Mary's Magical Adventure into a more modern time, unlike...some things.

I said these are interactive above, and you might not expect all that you can do with these trees. For one, you can knock leaves off of the trees with nearly any attack. If you hit leaves with a hammer, they will scatter and float through the air, but hitting them with a fireball will catch them on fire, making the leaves turn brown, drop to the ground, then turn into flames. It looks good in motion and is satisfying to do. In the future, there will be more of a reason to randomly become a pyro.

Only you can prevent wildfires...if you can resist the urge!

If burning leaves isn't good enough, how about the whole tree? Yes, if you damage the tree itself enough, it'll lose all of its leaves at the same time then collapse. Burn it enough and instead, every single leaf will start burning, then the tree dramatically falls down. If either of these events happen, the tree stays gone, even if you leave the area.

Now, don't worry if you like trees; You don't have to destroy fictional vegetation, but if you want to force all leaves off of a tree without permanently destroying it, just hit it with a cold attack like an Ice Ball and it'll start shaking then jump as it loses all leaves. When this happens, the tree survives and will re-grow its leaves back when you move far enough away from it.

This video shows all three tree deaths:

Now, all of this interaction comes with a cost, and that's a sprite render time increase of 0.02 per tree rendered in "high quality", which is what was seen in the videos. To counter this potential beauty turning into a lag source, all trees are drawn as a single image at far distances, just like the older trees. This results in the game rendering a single image instead of many leaf clusters plus a 3D model, and this is what saves the 0.02 sprite render time mentioned above.

This is actually something games do, more common on games with a continuous open world like Oblivion. I came up with the idea to do this before watching that video, so I had no clue it handled things the same way as my game. Oh well, I guess I can say I did something like Bethesda now. Whether that's good or bad's up to you, because...oh no, does this mean now I'll leave many game-breaking bugs in the final release? I hope not!

Anyways, if you don't like the trees abruptly changing between images and 3D models, you can adjust the distance by changing the r_objdrawdistance CVAR, which is a multiplier that defaults at 1.0. Increasing this will change the distances at which many decorative objects switch to lower quality, though it changes everything, not just trees. If on a lower-end system, it's recommended to decrease this to 0.5 or similar, given you can tolerate more obvious object pop-in.

Anyways, that's the latest update! There's more changes, but the new trees deserved their own blog post.

Magical Mary History #2 - v0.75 Part 2 (Early Monsters and Unused Oddities)

World of Kirbycraft's original monster lineup. Some may look familiar from Mary's Magical Adventure...

Welcome back! Last time, we looked at the intended but very flawed gameplay that I thought was fine back when I developed this version, plus the "test levels" in the game. This time, we're going to look at list of monsters that are in this version. Yes, I said there were none in normal gameplay, but oh, there's a small list fully programmed into the game at this point in development.

The Bestiary

Though not a single monster appears in this version, there are some programmed in /Decorate/kmonsters.txt, Some are from the Kirby series for obvious reasons, but others aren't. Here's the full list, in order of when they appear in the text file, from top to bottom:

"Mouse!" Silence this noisy thing and it'll become worse...

Scarfy (KDog1/KDog2)

Just like in the Kirby games, this innocent creature happily shows its true "dog" form when you hit it once. The only way to avoid seeing the "dog" is by dealing a lot of damage at the same time. This isn't considered a monster to the game until it transforms, so if you can resist the urge to shut it up, you have one less to worry about.

Gordo

Another common Kirby enemy, a spikeball with eyes. If you get near it, it will start flashing. Touch it, and it will yell "Mouse!" at you and send you flying away! This enemy is indestructible, so your best bet is to avoid it.

Wheelie (KWheel)

A wheel with an eye at its center that somehow maintains orientation while it rolls around. Wheelie is a dangerous and unpredictable enemy, slowly moving until it gets into the perfect position to run over you! Its speed (and really bad weapons in this version) make it pretty dangerous, taking three hits from Arthas's hammer to make this wheel's rubber explode!

Cyclops Troll (Troll)

This big, blue cyclops may look intimidating, but he's only a threat up-close, conveniently the only distance your weapons work at! When approached, the troll raises his arms then slams the ground below him, which causes damage to everything in the area. Compared to his appearance in Mary's Magical Adventure, he isn't as powerful here, plus doesn't have random arm-brace colors.

Huge Troll (HugeTroll)

This larger, red-colored variant of the Troll may look like he should be able to hurt you from longer distances, but in reality, he's nearly the same as his normal-sized counterpart, only 3¼× bigger! Unless you cheat or team up with a friendly monster, you will be here all day with this big pain.

Tiger

This aggressive animal is more complex than any other enemy in this version. Once it sees you, it changes its behavior based on your distance. Get up close and it'll prefer to try pouncing on you, but run away and it'll really speed up to catch you! Your best bet fighting this beast is to stand near it, wait for it to pounce, then strike it while it's down!

(Interestingly if you look at its back foot, it looks like I erased some pixels of the sprite without noticing all this time... This is probably still in the latest version.)

For those that want to see fights against all of these enemies, here's a video I recorded.

Strange Unused Content

All right, time for the really technical things that literally can't be gotten to in-game. These are mainly just sounds, but these sounds alone give a big impression that I really didn't know what I wanted from World of Kirbycraft back then, as if the whole game didn't give that away with its generic grassland level...

Inside wok_x.pk3's sound folder, a bunch of unused voice samples and "music" can be found. In the voices/Monsters subdirectory, enemy and player sounds are stored, but take a look at that directory's contents. See those WOKGUY sounds? Those were intended for common enemies that didn't deserve custom sets of voice samples. The tiger uses the last set, but every sample above that isn't used!

• STOCKAHH - Interestingly, this is the stock scream heard in games like Twisted Metal 3 and 4! I'm not sure why it's here, as no enemy ever used it. The Wilhelm and Howie screams were used in Doom II: The Monster Invasion's second version for zombies to use at random, so perhaps a similar thing was planned for World of Kirbycraft...
• WOKGUY set 0 - I love reversing songs with lyrics because they usually break down into hilarious nonsense, such as the notable "Can't Help Mice!" and "No No Heat". However, in this case, I think I used my laptop's microphone to record something, possibly an iPod or something, playing a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, which I then spliced and reversed for these samples. Most of them suck, but I like sample #4, where he sounds like he's saying "Stop that...!", which is assigned as a pain sound.
• WOKGUY set 1 - For this set, I think I recorded myself talking, then reversed and slowed down the recording over an unknown song. Parts of this overall larger sound were used as the samples here. I think this set was meant for strong, mysterious enemies like flying enemies firing magic projectiles at the player. In the end, it was never used, though it fails to sound threatening with lines like "NOM NOOOOOM~!" and "Pandora... PANDORA...!" (Yes, I listened to Pandora, that's why that's randomly here.
• WOKGUY set 2 - This, like set 2, is just my voice reversed, but with no speed adjustment. In this set, it sounds like a man who thinks the player is a mouse (like the Kirby enemies) and even yells "A MOOOOUSE!" sometimes upon seeing you. This was briefly used for the Fighter enemies in Mary's Magical Adventure until I recorded their proper samples.

The other subdirectories are arguably stranger, so here's another list:

• weird - This is, contains, fittingly, the weirdest two samples in the game, which sound like very slowed-down beeps with their bass increased a lot. I think these were supposed to be used in scary areas to mess with the player's head, like those "beats" I can't think of the word for that make you get certain feelings.
• dynamic_music - Hey, all of the cool games do it, but it's a a shame ZDoom isn't capable of dynamic music, which picks different parts of a song based on in-game activity. It didn't stop me from trying using ACS in a test level that I haven't found in any version of World of Kirbycraft yet.
  
  This folder contains four WAV sounds that play different sections of a basic song, which would be chosen based on where the player was located in the test level. It would've been cool to keep this, but due to ACS being limited to the tic-rate of ZDoom, I could only use tempos that were synced up well enough with it, which would've limited how varied my music sounded.
• ambient - "Wait, the ambient sounds were planned from the very beginning, Xane?" Sorta. The sounds in this folder are weird ModPlug Tracker recordings that used a strange, "organ-like" instrument. The first three are the raw recordings while the latter three have a reverb effect on it.
  
  I think these sounds would've come from an organ in a castle level, but clearly that never came to be as the sounds were removed after this version, and my plans changed by the time Mary's Magical Adventure became the game's new name...

This video plays most of these unused sounds, minus the "weird" ones, since those are barely audible without editing. Since I forgot to include it in the first post, Mary's voice acting is included here as well, specifically the lines that never got used or were removed in later versions due to the removal of beams and cup-based weapons. Apologies for how long it took to finish this post, which was supposed to be done months ago!