Wow, the last serious blog post I made was somewhere around a year ago, if you discount my quest to finish something for once series that went nowhere.

I've been through a lot mentally over the past year, and I think I kinda want to share it, or at least describe somewhat the changes that have occurred to my mind in the time.

This past year has been a unique year for me in the sense that it has been a year since I have been diagnosed as Bipolar and went through various therapies and a medication plan for it. It's a hell of a change from what it was last year.

And I certainly feel different too. A year ago, I was craving the stimulation I got from highs of a manic phase. This didn't go away for a while and I'm glad I didn't hurt myself in the meantime trying to achieve manic phases. I would often dip off my medication for a week or two in order to better feel the manic phases when they'd occur. Or more accurately, when I thought they'd occur. I thought I had some mastery over my moods, due to some techniques I had learned through therapy and whatnot. I thought I was in a capable place to control myself without the medication at some points. In retrospect, I was not, and still am not for that matter. I probably never will be. But the drive to do such acts to feel the nature of my extremes has passed, and I'm glad to have what I have rather than have the extremes.

The Extremes

I want to elaborate on how a bipolar extreme feels, as I think it's something that I wouldn't wish on my worst of enemies but at the same time would really want everyone to experience. The depression turns are pretty bad, you feel as if all of your energy is sapped and you cannot access it at all. You feel useless, worthless, etc. Depression stuff. I'm sure others can describe this better, as for the most part mine is just at the level of hysterically wanting to cease existing. That's all I really feel when I'm in a depressive extreme. It's hard to get out of bed on those days, and there have been days where I just have not. In recent times, it just reflects with how much I sleep mostly: I think I'm in a depressive state when I tend to sleep more than 12 hours a day (like the last week for instance, I have reliably been getting 16 hours of sleep a night). It's the manic extremes that I am more interested in explaining and describing. I enjoy these, but they can really be terrifying. You never know what you're going to do, and you feel blazing with energy, as if you are a god. That's the general description I give most people. During this extreme my creativity goes WILD, crafting many upon many things out of thin air and giving me scopes of an imagination I cannot fathom normally. Colors seem more vibrant, and my mind goes at a pace to where it cannot function rationally. My mind likes to destroy buildings that I'm around in what I call my perceptive vision when I'm in a manic extreme. I'll see the way the buildings explode and feel immense power as my mind sees the details of them, debris crackling, flying, smashing around.

The Tools

Perhaps the most important thing to say of this blog is that I've learned to harness some of the abilities I get in the creative landscape of my mind without having to be in a manic phase. I can use the perceptive vision to see a sort of visual overlay to what I'm seeing, or even completely have two vision feeds, one from my eyes and the other from my mind. It's pretty hard to explain in a way that makes sense, but I consider both aspects of them vision - although the perceptive vision is weaker to use for vibrant stills. Such as for instance I can't read much from my perceptive vision. I kinda want to see if I can train my brain to be able to read from my perceptive vision so that I can do things such as take mental shots of my vision and then be able to read them in the perceptive aspect later. I think that would be a very useful ability, but I don't think I can actually do that? Not sure. I can use my perceptive vision to experience video though, and the trigger I currently have for that is music. From the song I construct a video that incorporates aspects of my creativity, and it plays in the perspective visuals of my mind during the song. This is REALLY useful for expressing my creativity into a form that I can expand it, but at the same time I don't have the technical skills to where I've actually recreated a video from a song this way. In a way, that tool has been one of the major influencing aspects of PLatformed over the last year. Yeah, I actually have been working in my head on the story of PLatformed more and more. It's never going to be done, I know it at this point. But I'll be damned if I didn't do a recreation of the story at this point. My creative aspects with various songs linking it create a drive for me to want to create at least the major scenes of it. I think one day I may be able to at least have a rendering of one of the scenes I have laid out in my head for it.

The Future of PLatformed?

This is the segment where you all laugh at me.

I don't want to expand too much on the thing of PLatformed, other than that it's still a fairly linear game in my mind. It has been branched out to contain more "segments" of the initial point of the game, developing more gameplay with the complete team. I felt like if I left it the way it was, things would be a copout in terms of gameplay - it'd introduce you to the full kit then boom, game's over. Finally, I REALLY want to change the name now, because in my head it's totally a Third Person Action game rather than a platformer.

I've also decided that there's no way in hell GM could support my vision of the game any longer. Well, I guess it COULD, but I don't think it can honestly. It's time to modernize to a real engine if I ever decide to start on this thing. I'm thinking Unity.

Whatever, you can laugh, I can dream that one day I'll be able to make this damn thing. I can't today because of FINALS AUGH. Maybe this summer. I'm working with this random guy on a game project of his in XNA over the summer. Mostly planning to do graphics work. Yay, I'm terrible at that stuff, but maybe it'll make me less terrible so that I can work towards my dream.

I've blathered on long enough. I hit a mood change during writing this, so I'm pretty sure there's a hell of a shift somewhere in this.