You wouldn’t believe these update logs were originally supposed to be a bi-weekly occurrence, given my sporadic schedule with them. In fact, this is the first new log of the year — at least of its kind.
But without further ado, let’s get you up to speed on what I’ve been up to since late December, shall we?
Starting with my personal health (both physical and mental), I’ve been doing what I can to thrive. Getting into a consistent and rigorous workout schedule, keeping track of my calories and other nutrients (primarily protein intake) with an app, which has surprisingly led me to lose even more weight… though I’ll have to say that I’m also starting to see some actual gains. My legs have gotten a lot more firm over the course of last month, I’ve clearly been burning fat, I’m a lot more flexible now (albeit still not as flexible as I’d like to be), and overall I’m definitely very happy with the direction my body is headed. This month I’ve made the switch to push and pull days, and I’m already looking forward to the extra muscle it’ll help me put on.
Mentally, I’ve been having the occasional slump here and there (lasting from anywhere between a few days to a few weeks), but I’m making an effort to keep on top of things. I’ve started a gratitude journal, trying to list at least three things that I’m grateful for every night before bed, and I’ve also adopted the practice of making a daily to-do list with three items. Most of the time that includes tasks I need to get out of the way, but sometimes I can’t think of a full three things, so I stretch it with more mundane stuff like “work out” or “take a shower”. Writing this blog post is actually one of my tasks for today, so that should tell you how that’s been going for me.
On the topic of productivity, I’m also making an effort to try and minimize time spent doing nothing, especially early in the day: all too often to I find myself falling into the trap of thinking “it’s still early in the day, so I’ve got plenty of time to get everything done”, only to keep putting my tasks off until — oops — suddenly the day is already over and I haven’t actually gotten anything done at all. That kinda stuff. One of the measures I’ve started taking was making an effort to get out of bed as soon as I wake up, rather than staying in there for up to an hour or more just checking my phone. An early rise and a rigid schedule (breakfast at 8, music work from 9am to 1pm, lunch at 1pm, etc.) have definitely been helping a lot.
That said, I still need to find a full-time job, and despite all the systems I’ve put in place and habits I’m in the process of adopting, writing applications is something I’ve been putting off for close to a year now, so ideally I’ll at least have some sent out by the time the month is over. I’d definitely like to find a job in software engineering — or web design, seeing as I’ve been doing a lot of tinkering with the Retrograde Road website over the months, the latest additions being download counters, as well as a password-protected analytics page.
…which segues nicely into my creative endeavors that I want to talk about next. Regarding music commissions, I’m proud to say that I’ve already finished more commissions within the first four months of 2022 than I have throughout all of 2021: Four commissions and counting. As usual, you can find and listen to them in this playlist (except for one commission which I haven’t posted yet because I’m waiting for the client to use it himself first).
And of course, as usual, keep your eyes peeled on my Twitter, since I plan on reopening soon.
Regarding my other projects, the second game of the Mukai Project has… not exactly started development yet, but I’ve begun getting my feet wet with it again, creating a few assets and drafting up an all-new design doc. It’s not much to write home about yet, particularly since my priorities still lie elsewhere, but know that I’m chomping at the bit to get some serious work done on it as soon as I can.
What I need to prioritize instead is my third album (if Proto-Unreality Replication is counted as the first). I’d been wanting to get it released this year, but May has already started, and with that, a third of the year has already passed me by without any progress made whatsoever. I’m going to have to get the ball rolling on this one very soon, especially as the music isn’t all there is to the album. I’ll still need to draw an album cover and design the booklet, and the former in particular means having to derust and repolish my art skills.
But speaking of music, you can expect me to release a new non-commission, non-album, non-soundtrack song very soon. If not this week, then definitely the next. I just need to make a video for it, like for all the others… and honestly? I’m very excited to show it to you guys. It’s really, really good, and coming from me, that should mean something.
That’s it from me for now, though. I hope this update was long enough to be worth the lack of news from me otherwise. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay vigilant, and as always, thank you for your continued support!
Time flies by quickly when there’s a pandemic going on, doesn’t it? With 2021 coming to an end, I hope you had a happy celebration of whichever holiday your culture and/or religion observes. Stay healthy, stay safe, stay vaccinated, and let’s all do our part to make sure 2022 is the last year we’ll have to deal with this nonsense.
With that out of the way, I thought I’d take this occasion to give a recap of my activities over the course of this year, as well as what I have planned for the next year.
For starters, the blog itself has seen more activity than in any previous year. It had occurred to me that, given my sparse output of new works, I should start these update logs, just to keep people up-to-date and myself accountable — not that it was all that effective at that, no thanks to my life itself being a rollercoaster ride for my mental health, with far more downs than ups. At least things are starting to look up again in that regard, though, and I’ll continue to further work on myself the next year.
As for TGA-related stuff, I’ve managed to…
Draw something for TGA’s 8th anniversary
Release a new album
Redesign and overhaul the website
Create a Discord server
Release one final update for COL
Take and complete no less than three song commissions
All things considered, I’d say it was quite the productive year for me. I’ve also resurrected my YouTube channel, but the game videos I’ve been uploading on there aren’t quite within the scope of this team’s activities, so of course I didn’t put them on the above list.
Recently, the website has also surpassed 500,000 hits. Thank you all for your continued interest and support! If I had any amount of confidence in my drawing skills at the moment, I’d definitely be drawing something to commemorate the occasion. As it stands, though, you’ll just have to take this single paragraph instead.
On the topic of music commissions, they’ll continue to be open for the foreseeable future. Go here if you want to apply for one, and see here for a collection of tracks I’ve written over the years! My Twitter will be where you can be kept up-to-date, should the situation change in any way. I’m looking forward to your patronage.
Regarding the next year, I have the following resolutions:
To start with, obviously I want to begin development for the second game in the Mukai Project as soon as possible, preferably as early as January. I have my doubts that I’ll be able to actually finish it within the year, but I may or may not keep a public devlog.
I also plan to work on a new album and have it finished and put up for sale before the end of the year. Even for a 10-track album, it should be doable so long as I keep on top of my game with my time management and work ethic.
Additionally, in order to keep my momentum going with regards to composing, I’m going to aim for posting at least one new song every month, whether that be a commission or something I wrote for myself.
After years of burnout, I’m going to renew my efforts to get back into drawing again, as well. A lot of it is going to be practicing the basics, but training my mindset is also important so that I don’t end up burning out again.
Finally, just as a personal thing, I plan on taking the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test next July in order to try and get at least N3. I don’t really have any use for it other than bragging rights, but sometimes, that’s all the motivation you need.
And I believe that’s about it. Happy new year, and see you in 2022!
As you may or may not be aware, I’d been working on redesigning the website for the second time. Today, I was finally able to get everything wrapped up and publish the update, and I couldn’t be happier with the end result.
To commemorate this milestone, and in order for me to properly convey everything that went into making, maintaining and upgrading the website, I’d like to take a trip down memory lane and showcase said website’s transformation over the years.
The Prototype (2014)
This initial version was never actually anywhere close to being completed, and it would be a good bit over a year until anything actually went online. There’s not much I can say about it, either. My inexperience with web design was readily apparent as it was all purely HTML and a little bit of CSS, really shoddily made, and full of pretentious flavor text.
You’re hardly missing much.
Original Release, “Version 1.0” (2015)
On the 17th of July 2015, this is more or less the way we (there were more than just me at the time) graced the internet with our presence.
Much of the actual page content itself was inspired by ZUN’s website. The language buttons were huge, garish icons that weren’t even the same size (to say nothing of the odd design choice of diagonally splitting the English icon to show both Union Jack and Star-Spangled Banner), the navigation menu was pretty much a case of recycling old EB assets, and the page background image was a last-minute creation just to have some kind of patterned background.
For the longest time, there was hardly anything worth having a website for, either, as evidenced by the games counter at the top of the page (we really thought we’d be churning out one Touhou fangame after the other). All we really did have at the time was a playable demo of MajiKana.
If I gotta be honest, probably the biggest thing the site had going for it at the time was its bilinguality. I was really proud of myself for having figured out how to do it with some PHP, without needing separate pages for each language. This version lasted about two years, until it was replaced by…
“Version 2.0” (2017)
Starting from the 2nd of June 2017, this is what the website looked like. Say goodbye to the games counter and hello to an overall more streamlined, clean design. The overall layout hasn’t changed, though I did move the Twitter widget to the Contact page. A link to the Index page and a clickable icon were added to the navigation bar, too, as previously the only way to return to the Index page was via a link at the bottom of each of the other pages.
Wanting to get rid of the ugly background pattern somehow but still not knowing what other kind of pattern would work nicely, I ended up settling on a gradient instead. This is also kind of where the “TGA color palette” started becoming more of a thing, giving the website (and anything else TGA-related, really) a more coherent look.
Padding around the various page elements was also increased in order to make the design less claustrophobic, and of course the language buttons were redone, too (I opted for the American flag in the end).
Backend-wise, this was also the beginning of me becoming more competent with PHP and CSS, with feats including storing the ever-growing list of events in an array and dynamically building a table with as many rows as there were entries (or only the latest six). At one point I also tried creating a mobile version, but it was buggy as hell and a pain to maintain alongside the main site, so I removed it again about 10 months later.
Over time, as creative output diversified, I also ended up adding extra pages and making other small design changes here and there, bringing us to…
“Version 2.5” (2020)
With the extra pages added, the navigation menu grew, too, of course. Since I didn’t want the increased size to make it taller than most displays’ height, however, I recreated all the images at about 80% their original size.
The other change was me wanting to spice up the subheaders (like the “Latest News” one in the above screenshot), slowly moving away from using images for text. It was really tedious having to make new ones or edit existing ones; I don’t know what I was thinking.
All in all, though, version 2.x lasted by far the longest out of all versions up until this point, at just over four years and two months.
Intermission: Remember this thing?
Up until today, if you typed gensakudan.com into your browser’s address bar, this was where you would end up. Obviously the idea for such a landing page was stolen blatantly from ZUN’s own website(but then again, so was the team name). It really is one of the most Web-1.0-y things you could imagine. I loved it at the time, though; thought it was unique and a nice homage.
I suppose you could also take this blog post as a retrospective of how my tastes have changed over the years.
Anyway, it’s gone as of today, and typing the URL into your address bar now will instead bring you to…
“Version 3.0” (2021)
Oh my god everything’s different what the hell—
So yeah, uhhh… Turns out that four years is quite a lot of time to be thinking about what you really want out of your website. For starters, I didn’t want it to look like total crap if viewed on a mobile device, so I studied up on what web designers do nowadays and came across the term “Responsive Web Design”, or RWD for short. Basically, design your website in such a way that elements dynamically shift and resize in order to look nice no matter what size your window or display may be.
While we were at it, though, I also wanted a complete do-over, not just a glow-up of something that was fundamentally flawed since day one. To wit: during the planning phase, I spent several days agonizing over whether to keep the vertical navigation menu or swap it out for a horizontal bar. A lot of my design choices in the past essentially boiled down to me trying to go against the flow no matter what and bring back whatever I could of the past, regardless of how flawed or archaic it was for present-day sensibilities.
Because I’ve come to think more about why things work the way they do now, I eventually decided that a horizontal menu was the way to go, also largely because a vertical menu would have required a lot more effort and a lot more Javascript coding to set up, and I unfortunately put all my skill points into PHP…
’course, in thinking about what does and doesn’t work, what is and isn’t necessary, I also ended up trimming away a lot of fat. The Links page was pretty useless, as it was dedicated to literally three 200×40 banners with short (and ultimately pointless) descriptions for each. It got cut down and incorporated into the side column (which, in true RWD fashion, disappears if the display width is too narrow). The Gallery page was useless, too, as I literally only used it for a few YouTube videos, so it also got the axe.
The Goods page, meanwhile, technically still exists, but was repurposed into the new Music page, showcasing my released albums as well as other TGA- or me-related music. I was gonna make a custom audio player for these, but… again… effort. Reviving my Soundcloud account and using the embeds from that ended up being the more attractive solution.
The astute among you may also notice that the URLs look a lot cleaner now. No more gensakudan.com/index.php?lang=0&cookiecheck=1&otherpointlessvariable=why. In fact, “URL beautification” is another thing I looked into. Normally the variables wouldn’t have bothered me much, but I found that people kept copying them along with the rest of the address (including the cookiecheck one, ugh), so that was the impetus for that. Now everything’s neat and orderly at all times, and the website doesn’t even need to store cookies anymore because the site language is right there in the URL, naturally incorporated.
And don’t worry, I did make sure that pre-3.0 links don’t break. In fact, a lot of the final touches were to ensure support for legacy links.
Regarding new graphics, I updated the language buttons again, of course (and something compelled me to just go with the Union Jack instead), but the banners for other people to link back to this website were also looking like a right mess, so I ended up making all-new ones. Admittedly, though, the old ones did have kind of a particular charm to them, so I may or may not bring them back as an alternative… and the new ones haven’t entirely grown on me yet, either.
What’s in store for the future? Well, one thing I’d been wanting to add was Dark Mode. I’ve briefly looked into it, but have been kinda put off by the difficulty of it. Lightbox galleries for the game screenshots would also be neat. And of course there’s always the option of adding more languages for the website. I could do a German translation no problem, I just don’t know if I see the point in it. Maybe Chinese…?
That’s where we currently stand, though. Special thanks to Maribel Hearn for giving me tips and emotional support during the coding process, as well as Masataka Touji for his willingness to proofread my Japanese translations. And of course thanks to you, too, if you’ve read through the whole post up to this point.
Now that I’ve got this squared away, I can recommence work on the v1.20 update for COL. No ETA on when that’ll be ready yet, unfortunately.
Two weeks have passed, and here we are again. This update is going to be quite a bit shorter than the first one, though, mostly since there are only two things I’ve been working on.
Number one is, of course, the album. I was planning to have all the composing work out of the way by yesterday… and I guess I technically managed to do that? At least in the sense that I’ve at the very least got all the melodies and chord progressions I need to complete each track… but as you can probably guess, actual production has yet to come anywhere close to concluding, even without counting the mixing.
As the saying goes, the first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack. My schedule slipped, I had more days with no progress made than I’d like to admit, and distractions were aplenty. As much as it frustrates me to miss yet another deadline, I probably won’t get the album done until at least February at this rate.
Currently, the album is a little over 75% done. I’ll try my best to get as much progress done as possible this week so I can at least do a reveal of the track list before the month is over. Every track has at the very least been started on by now, with two that are technically already done but may need some tweaks all across the board.
On to my second project, though: the new website. If you’ve followed me on Twitter over the past two weeks, you’ll have seen me referring to it as “version 3.0”. I’m really happy with the aesthetic I decided on, and I’ve been following the concept of responsive web design in order to allow it to smoothly fit to displays of any size, which is so much better than the mobile version I tried to do back in 2017.
Unfortunately, though, I still struggle with backend stuff, particularly since I want neater-looking URLs, and the frontend stuff still has issues that have been frustrating me to no end, so no telling on when that update will go live.
And that just about covers the past two weeks. Both my sleep schedule and my work ethic really went down the crapper without me even realizing it, so wish me luck on getting my act back together.
As you might have read by now if you’ve seen my tweets, I thought I’d try resurrecting the blog and giving it a bit more of a purpose. Giving a general bi-weekly recap of what I’ve been up to seems like a worthwhile thing to do, as while I do use Twitter for journaling to some extent, the tweets end up all scattered and fragmented, whereas a blog post is going to be a lot more organized for that sort of thing.
So with that said, I hope 2021 is turning out to be a better year for you than the trainwreck that was 2020. Personally, I wish I could have gotten more done than a few small updates to COL, especially since a bigger update is still in the works. Hell, 2020 was supposed to be the year where I would finish and release the second Mukai game, but with my mental health in decline, I ended up not getting anything done on that front at all.
I did, however, divert my focus to creating a new music album, which is going to be my first talking point:
You may remember from my previous blog post how I wanted to get it done by the end of 2020. Obviously that didn’t happen, but assuming no further curveballs are thrown my way, I may be able to finish and release it by the end of this month. It will have 10 tracks and I plan to sell it on Bandcamp for €10.00. As with all Bandcamp albums, though, you can of course pay more than that if you want. Buyers will also receive a digital booklet in PDF format, containing song comments in both English and Japanese.
Current completion rate of the album is just a little under 70%. I found a work schedule that works for me, though, so I should be able to get the remaining tracks composed within the next two weeks. After that it’s just mixing, getting the mixes evaluated by my audio consultant, and drawing the album cover. Expect a reveal of the album name and track list within the next few weeks. Hopefully I can also do a premiere of the entire album on YouTube.
That’s the big thing, anyway. Other plans for the near future are as follows:
A complete overhaul of the TGA website. I’m not too happy with the current visual design, especially the overreliance on images with text, but the HTML and PHP (yes, PHP) are a hot mess in parts, too, and may warrant a rewrite. First I have to figure out what direction to take the design in, though, and my current biggest conundrum is whether I want to keep the vertical navigation or replace it with a horizontal one. I also want to try again with a mobile version if I can manage, but that’s relatively low-priority.
I might polish up and release some of the small games and clones I wrote years ago to wrap my head around coding, just to have something to show in this absolute content drought.
After I’ve released the aforementioned album, I may start taking song commissions. Do keep in mind, however, that if you’re looking for Touhou-style music, I may not be able to capture the style as convincingly as many other composers in the scene.
Obviously I also want to bring out the (hopefully) final major update to COL, which I’ll probably be dubbing v1.20a. It probably won’t add any new features on top of the v1.1x family of updates, but I do plan on refactoring the code as well as overhauling the dialogue, ending and replay systems. Once that’s all squared away, I can finally start working on Mukai 2 for real.
A second album later down the line. I already have a concept for it.
That should just about cover everything. I apologize from the bottom of my heart for practically disappearing for months on end and providing nothing noteworthy. Suppose it’s been a tough year for all of us…
At any rate, thank you for your continued support, and I hope you look forward to what I’ve got cooking!
Gensakudan Blog ― 懐古世紀日誌 