Status Update, October 2025

Overview

• Shinmera: released the Through to Myself Omnibus 2nd Edition

• Shinmera: released Imagine

• Shinmera: had another minor surgery

• Shinmera: had a mental crisis

• Shinmera: prepared a grant submission for Kandria's Switch port

• Shinmera: started working on a main menu for Weiss

Some Details

Okey, so, this month I tried my best to focus on university, attend lectures, all that stuff, but I'll be honest with you right out of the gate: I don't think this is working out at all and I'm currently pretty certain I'll be aborting my studies again already.

I just could not get myself to focus during the lectures, neither on the lecture content, nor on my own projects and work. Then when at home I couldn't get myself to focus on catching up with lecture content nor really on my own projects. I also tried going to the office again, see if that environment would be more fruitful, but alas, no dice.

Then last Friday I had another surgery, this time for a linguinal hernia that had developed in April. I'm still in recovery from that for the next three weeks, but I really hope that'll at least get rid of the pain I had once it's fully healed up.

And after that, this Monday and Tuesday I just kind of broke down entirely. I felt hopeless about my uni prospects as I hadn't managed to keep up with much of anything, hopeless about my general future outlook given that one of the few ideas I'd had on how to reach a sustainable future for myself was also unattainable after all, hopeless about my own personal problems and goals, and in general the world just seemed so screwed up.

Millions upon billions of dollars are thrown at ghouls that do nothing with that money except scam and exploit others or enrich themselves. All the while artists and other hard working people are barely able to scrape by to even be able to live at all, only to just get screwed over again and again at every turn. Where's the hope in that?

Anyway, thanks to therapy and friends lending me company, I've managed to recover from that for the most part and I'm feeling a lot better now. Still not great, by any means mind you, and especially comparing to how I felt a mere year ago (according to my diary) the difference is pretty stark. University turned my life from "going OK" to "absolute misery" in no time at all.

So yeah, I think I'm done with that idea. There's still some options I might want to consider once I'm in a better frame of mind again, such as remote studying online or something. I'd have to see if that's viable at all, but it's at least an idea. I've also been thinking about doing some contract work within my office, developing small tools to ease things for marketing and business and whatnot.

There's also the Zürich Filmstiftung grant for interactive media that's opened up and for which I'm submitting Kandria's Switch port. I had to prepare a bunch of documentation for that, and it's mostly done now. Just need to check it over one more time and then hand it in. If I'm lucky I'll get a bit of funding to finally finish that port and release a Common Lisp game on a console. Wouldn't that be neat!

In terms of other work, I've started preparing Trial for streamed resource loading, meaning loading stuff while the game is running, to cut down on blocking load times. For that I needed to change how images are loaded, so I can get metadata information without decoding images, which currently takes up a significant chunk of the load time. And then I decided to factor out Trial's whole image system into an independent library, which is now available as Imagine.

Imagine hasn't yet been back-ported into Trial itself, but I'll get to that soon. Before that, I wanted to do something that could actually be visible, so I started work on a main menu for Weiss:

The idea being that as you progress in the game, the room will gradually become more and more bloody. I also want to have a trail of blood down one of those corridors as a visual interest, but I haven't yet figured out the best way to author that trail, since the engine needs to actually paint that on.

Anyway, with that the month was already pretty much over, but I'll say, getting back to being able to actually focus on a development task like that really felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. It was such a relief.

I'm still not entirely back on my feet, but I hope that I can find my way again soon and continue making useful, cool, interesting contributions.

Until next month,

— Love, Shinmera ❤️