An Unexpected Game Update (and some personal stuff)
Posted on December 1st, 2024
I didn’t think I’d actually be doing this, but I’ve updated She Who Fights Monsters: Choice Edition. It was prompted by a random person caring enough to tell me 1)they enjoyed the original game and 2)they had run into some issues with the newer version. They first emailed me about a month ago and I had less than zero intention of ever touching that game again. But the fact someone still wanted to play it made me want to fix it if I could. So hopefully, some random things that would make the game stop working won’t do that anymore.
The truth is I’ve had some less than ideal experiences connected to my game projects. Ages ago, someone lovely gave me money to submit She Who Fights Monsters to Steam Greenlight while that program was active. I was so excited about the prospect of more people seeing it, playing it, maybe getting something out of it… until it seemed like everyone there was hurling insults at me for daring to submit my little project whose very existence apparently was Everything Wrong With Video Games. Even after I changed the potential price from $5.00 to free. So in the end, I withdrew it.
I also made a little experimental game called Erase Me. I wasn’t expecting a huge response or any response, really, but the only response I DID get was someone telling me it sucked.
When you’re just one person and you don’t have a huge fanbase or many (any?) people encouraging you, little things like that can eat at you like cancer. Looking back, those two things are a big reason I eventually just… stopped. Part of it was the drain of a 9 to 5 job. But the rest was just “Why bother? No one cares and you suck.” The good experiences I’d had thanks to creating and sharing things just faded from the picture, eclipsed by the threat of more bad ones and a lot of overwhelming indifference.
But living life like that hasn’t gotten me much. And the good things DO matter. Like the one person who emailed me with some nice things to say and just wanted to finish the game. To that person: if you’re reading this, thank you.
