seamus-ly

[seamus-ly]

Announcing the Queer Vampire IF Jam!

This is a month-long game jam that will run from January 10 - February 20th. The goal of this jam is to create more interactive fiction games about queer vampires, focusing both on queer relationships and queer experiences as told through a vampiric narrative.

JAM RULES:

Your project must focus on queer characters and vampires. Queer relationships, romantic or platonic, as well as other queer experiences, whether gay, lesbian, bisexual, ace, aro, trans and nonbinary - this is an inclusive jam. 

You can write from a human or vampire perspective (or both!)

This jam will accept any medium, so long as the work is an Interactive Fiction.

This jam will accept adult content as well as games covering heavy & uncomfortable topics, but please be sure to properly list trigger warnings either in-game or on the game page.

Entries that promote any kind of bigotry will not be accepted.

Games should not include any AI generated content.

You can submit as many entries as you'd like.

You are allowed to start working on your project early! That's why I'm announcing it now. This jam is unranked and it's not a contest, this is just for fun.

Submissions open midnight, January 10th EST. They'll close February 20th at 11:59pm EST.

Join the jam here!

🩸​Get dark and bloody and nasty.​🩸​

hosted by me, @nyehilismwriting, @attollogame

#game jam

[seamus-ly]

Developer Interview (hosted by @vividfoundry)

I was interviewed by Tanya of Vivid Foundry over on Twitter! We talk about how I deal with taking on different tasks across disciplines, and even what my favourite characters are in the game itself.

(Which is coming out this year, by the way, be sure to wishlist us on Steam if you're interested in keeping up to date! 😎)

I've been working with this development team for almost 2 years, and it's been incredible. I'm happy to speak on some of my experiences so far, and hopefully once we can start spoiling things, I can do it again with some more detail.

Check out the interview thread starting here!

It will also be posted to other sites after the fact in a more readable format!

#indie games #indie dev #game development #video games #interview #solace state #solst

[seamus-ly]

Year of 2023: Solace State is featured on Kotaku!

Happy New Year! Wow, it's been a while!

Excitingly, our video game Solace State is featured on Kotaku's 30 Indie Games You Should Know About Releasing In 2023! "Do you like to get introspective with narrative adventure games that ask you big, life-changing questions...?" asks the article.

By the way, I took some time off during the holidays and into the New Year because early December was incredibly rough on my health. It was sorely needed! I feel like only this weekend do I find myself tackling my gamedev work with smiles & good energy again

[seamus-ly]

Starting 2023 Not With a Bang, but With a Post

Happy holidays and happy new year, first of all. I'm one of those people who tends to struggle throughout the holidays, and so it was a bit rough for me, but I sincerely hope that it was better for a good majority of the rest of you.

I ended my 2022 by falling asleep 15 minutes before midnight and waking up at 1:30 AM. The first thing I did waking up was opening Twitter and writing out a few 2023 goals I had in mind but couldn't find the energy to commit to paper before the year turned over.

In an effort to use this account more often to document my progress through my career, because I want to hold myself somewhat accountable by putting it all down somewhere, and because I find it therapeutic to talk about these things, I'm gonna throw down a few things I'm hoping to achieve this year.

Career-related goals in game dev, and some of my achievements from 2022

Health-related goals for this year so I don't go insane

Other goals like art and setting up a tip jar

Career-related Goals

I'm a game dev, and you probably already knew that going in.

In 2022, I had a hand in two games that had their official releases (and are still on sale heehoo), and I'm currently working on two other indie games! This was a big deal for me. Not only in that I had mostly positive experiences and it was a huge turning point in my career in games, but because I had some negative ones too.

The negative doesn't come close to outdoing the positive, but it did help me reprioritize some things in my life and reflect on events from the past few years. Though I'm a bit heartbroken by some things I'll likely never get back, I'm ready to keep moving forward.

With that out of the way, I'm hoping to make at least 1 new game this year--not counting projects I'm already working on. I made Wish You Were Here! and finished the very first prototype for TECHNOLYMPUS in 2022. So, my big hope is to polish it up and finally get an idea for what TECHNOLYMPUS will really be about through that.

(They were both featured by the Hand Eye Society last year as well!)

I'm also hoping to participate in at least 1 game jam too. Setting the bar low so I can realistically cross it.

Health-related Goals

These ones matter the most to me, if I'm being honest.

Late 2022, I had a bit of a revelation thanks to my well-meaning and lovely friends. They are my best friends of all time, but I will still (jokingly) blame them for my horror in realizing just how much ADHD was affecting my everyday.

I'm undiagnosed, but my family has a history of ADHD and it never occured to me that it extended to me as well for a bunch of silly reasons. In retrospect, and after properly researching it myself, I guess it was always obvious and I just didn't know enough about it to understand what was going on.

But executive dysfunction obliterated me last year, and it's about time I stopped pretending it's because I'm not working hard enough.

So, my big goal is to get medicated. Secondary goal is to lose at least some of the weight I've gained from falling into some really bad mental health pits over the last 6-7 months or so.

Tangentially related to my health, I work multiple jobs right now and I also desperately require me-time. I tried to make a schedule of when I'd be doing what, but I couldn't stick to it on account of my deteriorating mental health and the whole executive dysfunction thing. Which, predictably, just made things worse.

I'm going to try really hard to stick to a schedule for at least a few weeks in January. Maybe I'll ask if some of my friends can keep my accountable and yell at me if I'm working in what are supposed to be my off-hours.

Other Goals

Here's some other stuff I want to try to do, and are a bit more lax with one exception.

I want to set up my Ko-fi for like actual tips and stuff. I don't have a ton of stuff to offer as rewards, and I don't think I'll have the bandwidth for regular updates (maybe monthly?), but I'd like to be able to offer something for people if they're going to support me. I'm currently thinking of little game dev or Unity tips, or art.

And speaking of art, I'm going to draw more! I haven't cared about developing my art style for literal years. I don't do it for my job, it's just a hobby. But I want to keep trying to get better regardless in light of how I've begun doing it in my downtime again. Going to work on developing my style drawing humanoids again, and working out something that works for me instead of trying to force a style I'm not too pleased with.

Lastly, I want to start drawing a ton of Pokemon. Damn, I love Pokemon. I'm going to draw all of them someday hopefully, even if the next gen comes out before I come even close to finishing all there is now. There's no timeline for this, I just want to start working through the National Dex sometime this year.

That's All, Folks

If you made it to the end of this, thanks! I don't write these lengthy posts for a need of keeping people updated (because I don't have that big of a following frankly), I write them because I like keeping a record of my progress.

But I truly appreciate anyone who stay up-to-date with what I'm doing, and I hope that whatever scraps of content I put out there appeals to you in some way.

2022 was both parts great and awful, and I feel like that's normal for the weird few years we've all had. I wasn't doing so hot at the end of the year, and it's likely I'll probably start feeling the dip in mood again soon. In spite of that, I'm looking forward to whatever steps I manage to take this year. And I hope that you manage to do what you set out to do as well.

#personal #long post #seamus speaks #i also only slept 3 hours today lmao oops

[seamus-ly]

Newest in-game footage from our indie game Solace State, which started off years ago as my self-funded project and then got some excitement! Now we're a team of many talented specialists. I've put a lot of my own passions and experiences into the story! There will be a new trailer coming in early 2023!

#solace state #wip

[seamus-ly]

✨ Hey, I'm Seamus! ✨

I'm a technical designer with proficiency in programming and working on narrative-driven games.

I currently have no plans to post much to this blog due to NDA hell, but if I ever start up my personal projects again, I'll likely put up devlogs and the like.

For now, can find me more actively here:

Personal: @firstbroodsgaze

Twitter: seamus_ly (until it explodes for real)

Discord: If we were mutuals on Twitter or know each other IRL, DM me.

#about #pinned