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Season 1, 2025

2025-03-31

Hello again! Here we are at the end of March of 2025, and it's been an enormous three months. There's been massive energy, burnout, finished projects, and big life changes all at once! This is going to be a big read, buckle in. (If you need some reading music, check out the Albums in the Creative Intake section)

Lets take a look at where we left off at the end of 2024:

Time Blocking
… The hope is, by the end of the season, I'll have a much better grasp on what I need to spend my time on in order to feel good and I can let the time blocking schedule do it's thing without much interference from me.

Less "work" more WORK
I've been lucky enough to be in the position where I can afford to cut my work hours in half in order to pursue gamedev and audio professionally. This is a very exciting opportunity and I definitely want to take as much advantage of the next year as I can in order to guarantee I can sustain it as much as possible into the future.

Some other guiding principles for 2025:
➡️ Show up regularly for practise and composition
➡️ Put myself first when I need to
➡️ Be an active member of the communities I am in
➡️ Be bored. Be tired. Bot only because I'm confident in my time
➡️ Embrace being a protagonist
➡️ Stop reading about it and just do the thing

Alright that's a decent chunk of stuff, and also won't cover everything I've got to talk about, so looks like there's a lot of reading ahead.

An Update

I think it's going to be useful to detail where I'm at right now as it'll give context to pretty much everything I'm writing here. The big one is that I resigned from my day job. One thing I've found interesting when divulging the news to people is that people in my demographic will give an enthusiastic "Congratulations!", whereas people who are older will have a general look of concern.

I personally feel both of these responses myself, part relief that I no longer have to waste my time not learning anything, and doing menial tasks for a product I don't really care about, but also it means I'm out of a job lol. I'm very lucky that I have enough saved (and leave payed out) that I'll be able to sustain myself for a few months without worry, but money will be a looming presence in this upcoming season. Nevertheless, this is a radical shift and will definitely change the approach going into next season.

Time Blocking

I enjoyed time blocking for this season! I think I got a lot of good info out of it. I wasn't able to commit for the whole 3 months (to be honest I wasn't expecting to…), but I did stick to it for most of the time!

The system was just a spreadsheet with a table for each week, which then had hourly slots I would assign to a category (Sleep, Social, Work, House, etc). I would plan each week in advance, and then update the sheet once the week was done to make sure the data was accurate. This system worked pretty well, and allowed for lots of reflection week to week and meant adjustments could be made with good accounting for upcoming events.

One of the big takeaways for me here were that I shouldn't push myself to get stuff done "before the work day starts". I'll either forget or miss it entirely, or get frustrated that I don't have enough time to get everything in my life done in a 2 hour time frame (while I'm still sleepy).

The other was that I do, in fact, need to get more sleep. I like to imagine that I can get away with 6-7 hours, but I would end up getting grumpy and then sleeping during the day on the weekends or something. I always ended up averaging around 8.5 hours so that's what I loosely aim for now.

My situation is pretty different now, so revisiting this might be on the table, but for now I don't think it's something that's going to make my life easier. So I'll take my findings and implement them day to day, but hour-to-hour tracking is not continuing into next season.

Less "work" more WORK

Well yeah this was kind of taken care of hahah 😅. I'm now all in on making games and music (at least for this season) I'm very fortunate that I'm able to take on this opportunity without many sacrifices so I'm going to try and take as much advantage of it as I can, and pay as much forward as possible. I don't anticipate working myself to the point of burnout, but I do want to push myself in this upcoming season.

Those other guiding principles

Whew. Lots of reflection there. Let's talk about some other stuff that happened this season!

Residency Game Jams

To kick off the residency, we did 3 game jams in as many weeks. This was fun and everyone learned a lot, but unfortunately I was big time burned out afterwards. It's good to know that 2 weeks off does really restore energy, but I was a bummer to have it all gone so early. This is also tied up in having to deal with a lot of new and constant social interactions. Overall these were good fun!

Game audio upskilling

After the game jams were done, it was time to dig into filling in the gaps that I felt while making games in quick succession. Basic Unity scripts were first on the block, got some basics up and running pretty quick (need to revisit this soon I think, want to increase my Unity chops) and then it was into grown up tools Reaper & FMOD. I'm happy to say at this point it is easier for me to use these two tools than anything else when making audio based stuff for games. There's still a lot for me to learn and improve, but I'm glad to have these in my toolkit!

Cyclone Alfred

We were lucky to not be affected (pretty much at all) by Cyclone Alfred. We did a bit of prep, boarding windows & stocking up, ready for no electricity and no supplies for about a week. It came and went with little fanfare. It seems like it wasn't as bad as anticipated overall, which is good.

Camp Squiggly

A highlight for this season! I was very lucky that I was asked to go on Camp Squiggly, I had some hesitations initially, but I am glad I took the leap. Myself and ~12 other game makers spent 3 nights in a big old house 2 hours out of the city, with no internet connection and we all just worked on some stuff for fun! The organisers did a fantastic job setting the groundwork and getting everyone in the right headspace for it to be an enjoyable event. I made a Pico-8 game, which people enjoyed playing (a nice bonus, I was honestly just glad I was able to get into the zone enough to finish something in the time frame). I was also able to make some breakcore music for another person's project which was good fun. I definitely want to explore the genre more, there's a good amount of room to practise music production principles and add a bit of compositional flavour too. (I should share this somewhere, might do so after finishing this)

Sound Processing Unit (Semi-Secret Project)

We had our first rehearsal for the Sound Processing Unit project, and it was a lot of fun! We're hoping to kick things into high gear so we can get it off the ground soon!

Memory Card Audio

I launched Memory Card Audio this season! This is a business that I'll use for any videogame sound endeavours going forward. The big launch is my first music pack for people to purchase (with real money). There have already been a couple of sales (Encouraging!) but as it's the first things attributed to the MCA itch page, it's taking a while to be indexed, which makes natural discovery rough. I kicked this off with a study playlist video using all the tunes, and it performed pretty well (perhaps thanks to youtube's mafia like promotion — "First one's free, kid"). I'm interested to see whether this will snowball further, or whether the internet truly does bury stuff once it's no longer new.

Creative Intake S1, 2025

Movies

Videogames

Tabletop Games

Books

TV

Albums

Plans for Season 2, 2025 (April - June)

Last year, when putting together the overview for 2025, I tried to put some themes to each season. I don't have last years notebook on me, so I'm working from memory here, but I believe S1 was about planting seeds & feeling things out. S2 about knuckling down and getting things done, S3 about finding the balance, and S4 about showing things off to others and setting up for 2026 (Kicking off with MIGW at the beginning of October, right at the start of the season). Anyhow, I feel like things are on track to follow these themes moving forward. It means an intense season is incoming, and I'm aiming to have some things to show off by October so let's put together some goals and guiding principles to keep things on track.

There's a lot there, and I'm probably missing some stuff too. I'm still not 100% sure how the Memory Card Audio stuff is going to work with credits on other people's projects but that's a bridge I can cross once I get to it. This season I'm focussed on putting in the hours and not getting too distracted or diverted 😤

Some other things happening in Season 2

Well there it is! Season 1 of 2025 done and dusted! A lot of Season 2 rides on my own strength and determination, so I've got to be sure to do everything I can, and ask for help when I need it. At the beginning of the year I don't think I could have anticipated where I'd be by the end of Season 1, and who knows, I might be able to say the same at the end of Season 2.

Thanks for reading, and as always, live your dream.

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