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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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Janaina Medeiros
@theartofmadeline
Today's Document
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styofa doing anything
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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@empyreumata
tag index 🗃️ «work in progress» 🤷♀️
people → (all) • torso • back • butt • chest • neck • arms • legs • hands • mouth • kissing • face • skin • ear • eyes-minor • eyes-major • vasculature • hair • side profiles • likely a difficult to draw perspective • the body intertwined in some way (e.g. hands, legs) • self-portraits//selfies -with a small mirror • portraits • the body in an unique/odd pose ☆
𝓐𝓵𝓮𝔁 𝓖 (𝒻𝑒𝒶𝓉. 𝓔𝓶𝓲𝓵𝔂 𝓨𝓪𝓬𝓲𝓷𝓪) – "𝒯𝓇𝑒𝑒𝒽𝑜𝓊𝓈𝑒"
"𝘿𝙤 𝙉𝙤𝙩 𝙀𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙧" 𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘰𝘳𝘸𝘢𝘺. 𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘯'𝘵 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘨𝘰 𝘢𝘸𝘢𝘺? 𝘌𝘹𝘤𝘦𝘱𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶 – 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘺․․․ 𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘥𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘺 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦? 𝘐𝘵'𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘐 𝘴𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘬 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘭𝘰𝘶𝘥. 𝘜𝘴𝘶𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺, 𝘐'𝘮 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘺 𝘮𝘺𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧․․․
Florian Pohl - Hamburg Ballet
photography: Paulio Sovari [x]
my other grounding technique is remembering that the earliest abolitionists & the earliest suffragists had no proof that the world would ever make possible what they fought for and indeed many of them did not live to see it come to pass. and yet they did not succumb to despair so it would be disrespectful to their memory to let it overtake me
"Hᴏᴡ'ꜱ Tʜᴀᴛ Hᴏᴜꜱᴇ Tʜᴀᴛ Rᴀɪꜱᴇᴅ Yᴏᴜ?"
𝚃𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎'𝚜 𝚊 𝚖𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚘𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚐𝚛𝚘𝚠𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚛𝚑𝚞𝚋𝚊𝚛𝚋 𝚌𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚍 "𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚌𝚒𝚗𝚐" 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝚒𝚝'𝚜 𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚜𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗 𝚝𝚘𝚝𝚊𝚕 𝚍𝚊𝚛𝚔𝚗𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚒𝚗 𝚋𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚏 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚟𝚊𝚕𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚌𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚕𝚎𝚕𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝. 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚜 𝚘𝚗𝚕𝚢 𝚋𝚎𝚌𝚊𝚞𝚜𝚎 𝚒𝚝'𝚜 𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚔𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚊𝚗 𝚊𝚋𝚜𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚜𝚞𝚗, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚎𝚡𝚝𝚎𝚗𝚍𝚜 𝚜𝚘 𝚏𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚌𝚊𝚗 𝚑𝚎𝚊𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚐𝚛𝚘𝚠𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚙𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚜. 𝙵𝚘𝚛𝚌𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚌𝚊𝚗 𝚠𝚎𝚊𝚔𝚎𝚗 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚌𝚛𝚘𝚙 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚒𝚏 𝚍𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚌𝚘𝚛𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚕𝚢 𝚌𝚊𝚗 𝚢𝚒𝚎𝚕𝚍 𝚊 𝚜𝚠𝚎𝚎𝚝𝚎𝚛, 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚒𝚛𝚊𝚋𝚕𝚎 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚞𝚕𝚝. 𝙽𝚘𝚝 𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚛𝚢𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚗𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚋𝚎 𝚊𝚗 𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚎𝚐𝚘𝚛𝚢. 𝙰𝚕𝚕 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚊𝚖𝚎, 𝙸 𝚊𝚖 𝚊𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚑𝚊𝚙𝚙𝚎𝚗𝚎𝚍 𝚒𝚗 𝚖𝚢 𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚢𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙸 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚗𝚘 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚍𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚛𝚒𝚋𝚎 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚘𝚗𝚕𝚢 𝙶𝚘𝚍'𝚜 𝚎𝚢𝚎𝚜 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚜𝚎𝚎𝚗.
— ❦ — St. Valentine, Lev. (@dogrotpdf) “How's that House that Raised You?" In Pyre House, 72. 2025.
Matilda: I wasn't good enough for anyone. Not even myself. I'm done chasing my reflection. I can't do this anymore!! There's no point existing if I can't be beautiful... Michelle: I'm... sorry. I hope this won't hurt. Matilda: I hope it does.
𝕸𝖞 𝕮𝖍𝖊𝖒𝖎𝖈𝖆𝖑 𝕽𝖔𝖒𝖆𝖓𝖈𝖊 – "𝓗𝓮𝓵𝓮𝓷𝓪"
"So long and goodnight So love your good night"
I will succeed because I’m crazy
Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)
[DeviantArt@VGCartography]
To Be Alive
by Gregory Orr
To be alive: not just the carcass But the spark. That's crudely put, but… If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?
Venus
by David Welch
The dead shit their beds and little flowers grow above them.
Peaceful, the world stays draped in linen.
Such a soft sound, being eaten from inside your own skull.
"Most of the time, people suffered to make something you could enjoy.
You're welcome to praise or shun the art by itself, but don't patronize the creator for their effort.
I didn't have fun making Orbo. I hated it. And even though I hated it I still tried to put passion into it, because I care about my work."
— @feverdreamjohnny
Reno Gold (tt@gold_reno) [x;y;z] — "Reno Gold Is Putting His OnlyFans Stardom to Good Use." ViewGuy. Interview, March 3, 2021. [x; archived]
Orbo's Odyssey - Post Mortem
My Feelings About The Game
It's an odd thing to try and pull together your thoughts about something so chaotic.
I guess it'd be easier to just catalogue how my emotions evolved as the project went on, and then wrap it up by trying to pull apart how I feel now, as arcane as that is.
I've been a part of a private developer community for a bit now, and during a majority of my time there I felt sort of like a fish out of water. I guess it was just weird seeing people at the top of their craft while my work sort of paled in comparison. A majority of them had a background in developing character action games or platformers with intricate movement systems, and that was absolutely outside the range of what I understood.
Late 2022 I decided to try and make a movement system with a really strong focus on momentum so I could feel "at home" with the other devs. So I made a small tech demo where most of Orbo's moveset was formed.
In the end it didn't really make me feel more confident in my work, but at least I proved to myself that I could tackle unfamiliar waters and make headway. Regardless, I left the tech demo where it was and continued to work on Nowhere, MI for the next few months.
I made a lot of progress on Nowhere, and around late November a publisher reached out to me to offer help. I was desperate, after all. I didn't have a lot of money to my name and this was the kind of lifeline I needed to secure so I could finish the game.
To cut a long story short, they kept delaying talks about the game over and over and it became increasingly clear to me that my dream of being funded wasn't going to happen.
I was sort of in a bad spot now. It was early 2023 at this point, and I was going to have to make a tough decision: delay Nowhere and get a retail job to make money (potentially losing sight of the project in the process), or find some other solution to secure funding. No other publishers were going to pick me up (and I really didn't trust a majority of them so I only had my sights set on a handful I felt I could trust), so I came to a new conclusion:
What if I just made something short, say in the span of a month or two, and sell it? Surely that would be easy.
Surely.
The Game
In March of 2023, I began working on the game. I wasn't sure what sort of format I wanted for the game at first, and I had initially considered a rogue-like arena combat game where you'd use the game's momentum mechanics to fight enemies, collect upgrades to improve your abilities, rinse and repeat.
The idea ended up feeling sort of strange when I began pre-production, so I ended up scrapping it.
I thought about the movement system some more and realized that it had a strange kinship to a game I had played just a month earlier: Super Kiwi 64.
Then I thought about Siactro's other games, how they were similarly small-scope platformers that seemed to perform well on Steam and Switch, and I realized that if there was something that would suit my own development style (focused around exploration and secrets), it was a 3D platformer.
The first month was fairly strong. I moved at lightning-speed, hammering systems into the game piece by piece. Collectables were done. Time trials (and their records) were done. Movement had been refined further and felt better than in the initial tech demo. There was also a lot of underlying structuring that I won't get into because it's boring (but important).
About a week in I even started working with my friend Tim (who's a professional environment artist), and we began working together on the hub environment (we brainstormed the layout, I designed the greybox, and he wrapped it up with the environment art).
It was going great, but as March was nearing its end I began to realize what I was dealing with.
"Oh, well yeah I mean I knew it wasn't going to be possible in a month! I'm sure if I grit my teeth it'll be done by the end of April!"
So April came along. Tim and I finished the hub area, I got the world portals set up, and eventually we moved to the first level of the game, Shlarp City.
Tim managed to get a decent chunk of the decorative props done, but circumstances were changing and he had a fulltime job in the industry to attend to, so he had to leave the project.
I reasoned "well, I sort of know how to do environment art and I guess I can just go on without help."
Shlarp's greybox was done, and I was sort of happy about the layout. Some friends playtested the game and liked the movement, so I felt a bit more optimistic about the project.
Despite the boost in optimism, I was starting to feel some kind of dread leaking in. My nights were becoming more frantic and troubled, more than they already had been.
I moved onto the next level, reasoning that it'd be best to get the greyboxes for all of the levels finished first, then return for an art pass afterwards. It was the sensible thing to do, after all.
So I began work on Dunbarrow Mines, and this time I was alone. I finished the greybox, and while I wasn't a huge fan of the level, at least it was done. I moved onto Sleepytime Manor and similarly got the greybox finished. Even since the beginning of the month, something was starting to grow inside of me. April was coming to a close, and I still had another level to greybox, a boss fight, secret areas to add, and an art pass on the entire thing. I hadn't really developed much of a game at that point, just 3 barren levels.
And so May came along.
And this was where it all went to hell.
I had been suffering from a lot of issues in my personal life for a while. The year prior had been particularly traumatic and the waves coming from it weren't done passing over yet. If anything the terror was that the major event from the last year hadn't even finished coming to fruition. The stress from everything had caused me to develop a disorder that made my blood acidic, melting away at my nerves. I fought hard and managed to improve my health, but the damage was done and the occasional return of the neuropathy was just a reminder that my life was spiraling downward.
I entered a period of intense stress and depression as waves of terrible memories came over me. I became neurotic. Started having trouble designing levels. It was already an issue for me, but as my mental state deteriorated I was hitting brick walls over and over.
I had my back against the wall. Game development was my only purpose in life, after all. I had been built for it, sacrificed so many hours to it, put everything else aside for it. The only thought going through my head was that I was dying, and that this stupid game was going to be my graveyard.
So roughly two months came by, with sparing work on the game. I finished Monolith station, but it had to be redesigned 3 times to reach the version you currently see in the game today.
The neurosis made me insane. Constantly seeing my peers succeeding while I flailed desperately in a pit was definitely not helping matters.
But something changed in June.
The Garden
I always had an on-and-off again relationship with plants. I had a sort of preternatural skill with growing things, but my interest waxed and waned a lot. The main thing that stuck through this on-and-off relationship were herbs, since they were easy to cultivate and they needed very little maintenance during the periods where I was losing interest.
As I began to take game development more seriously around halfway into 2021, I stopped gardening entirely.
But something very strange happened in the June of 2023. I was frantically compelled to return to it. I raked, toiled and weeded until I had a plot. Then I started buying seeds and began cultivating vegetables again for the first time in 2 years.
And for the first time in this nightmare I was finally happy about something. I don't know what compelled me to start cultivating plants again, but whatever it was, it rescued me from a very long, dark road.
After 2 weeks, I finally finished the final boss of Orbo's Odyssey.
The game needed a lot more work, but I was finally getting a foothold after months of misery.
Eventually my friend Ben was able to help me with the project, and we made a lot of headway. We brainstormed new ideas for how the player could get gear parts. He modeled a load of props. I scripted a load of systems. Finally, the game actually began to look like a game.
Ben was really important. He was optimistic about the project and wasn't suffering from burnout the way I did, and he helped me get out of my fugue. I can't thank him enough for his help.
After around half a year of hammering, we finished the game.
3 weeks after that, we released it to steam.
And about 2 weeks after the release, we're here now.
The Takeaway
Typically in post-mortems you talk about what you would've done differently, but I think this ending might be a bit different.
I'm not really proud of the level design. I think I also could've done better with my share of the environment art in some levels. I think there could've been more details. I think there could've been more content.
But there's no use kicking myself for what could've been. Of course the next game will be better. The mental state I was in during the development of this game was dire and it had a major impact on the quality of my work. I had to break out of a really bad mindset and try to find a better way of engaging with my life. That wasn't easy.
I think some gamers like to imagine that something that's fun to play was fun to make. It's true that sometimes there are moments where you get excited during game development, but at the end of the day the majority of it is just pure work and toil.
In the end, the reviews on Orbo were very kind. Even the negative reviews were at bare minimum sorta funny.
Hilariously the reviews that bothered me the most were actually positive. The perspective of these reviews was that the game was really the story of some little kid taking his thumb out of his mouth and naively making something he thought was fun. It mainly felt like a way for the reviewers to excuse the weaker elements of the game.
These are the reviews I hate the most. I don't care that they were positive. They're infantilizing. It makes it come across as though the shoddier elements of the game weren't a product of a person having a mental breakdown, but of a child smacking blocks together and making mistakes because he didn't know better.
If you really view art like that, I want you to lean in very closely and listen: Most of the time, people suffered to make something you could enjoy. You're welcome to praise or shun the art by itself, but don't patronize the creator for their effort. I didn't have fun making Orbo. I hated it. And even though I hated it I still tried to put passion into it, because I care about my work.
Anyway I'm glad it's over with. If I attempted to develop the game now it would probably be significantly better, but that's mostly because I've found better methods of managing my mental health.
I have to get back to work on Nowhere, and eventually I have to work on Peeb Adventures. For now, though, I'm taking a break. I'm tired.
Before I go I just want to thank some people.
Thank you Ben for being supportive and helping me make this game happen. I couldn't have done it without you, and I mean it.
Thank you Socpens and Grayfruit for streaming the game and for your kind words. It really means a lot to me, and it gave me a lot more confidence about Orbo's Odyssey post-release.
Thank you Tim for helping early on. I know it was a brief period between us, but I do appreciate the work you did.
Thank you (in no particular order) Bryce, Simone, Jett, Aaron, Quinn, Drew, Ian, and Cosme for being supportive of my work.
Thank you for the folks in the private dev server who were particularly supportive as well.
Thanks for reading.
Orbo's Odyssey: Steam; Itch.io
ok it's time to sleep for a few hours and try to be less insane tomorrow i guess 👍
Im like if an unemployed person had a job
