Hi! A little introduction

Hi! Welcome to my new shiny WordPress blog! Thanks so much for your visit.

I go by the name Pingudroid. I’m a multipotentialite queer weirdo who loves Game Boys and penguins and bad romance stories. You may know me for my chiptune music, or perhaps for my monster designs, my pixel-art, or maybe my Godot Engine project (formerly named Monster Embassy). Also I’m on Twitter. Or perhaps you don’t know me at all and you’ve come upon this page by chance. Either way, welcome! I hope you enjoy your stay.

Over the years I’ve been on the Internet under many names, have created numerous webpages and blogs and profiles (so many that I honestly cannot keep track) and have started many creative projects and finished few.

Since this is a personal blog and I’m going to use it as a creative diary of sorts, I thought I could start off by summarizing my artistic trajectory a bit. Feel free to skip all of this if you want — future blog entries will focus more on my current artistic endeavors, but I felt like I should start by introducing myself.

I have a passion for fiction, in all of its forms. I’ve always been a pretty secluded person, so fiction (books, comics, animation, videogames) has been, and still is, the main way I get to experience other worlds and lives. Since I was little, my dream has been to create my very own world of fiction, a world that I and others could share and enjoy, with memorable characters and an enjoyable and meaningful story. A world like the ones I love so dearly, but made by me. My very own contribution to fiction.

This dream has changed forms many times. Back when I was in middle school, I drew a lot of anime characters and Digimon- and Pokémon-like monsters, and dreamed of being a mangaka. In high school, I read books like a maniac and decided to be a professional writer. Then, a few years later, after studying literature at college sucked out most of the joy of it for me, I started taking videogames (one of my recurring hobbies) more seriously and slowly considered becoming a game developer.

My creative interests and projects have generally been…scattered, as you can see. Also, like most people who dream of being a creator, I tend to think big and not really finish any projects I start. This has been true all of my life. Along the way, across failed comic and book and videogame projects, I’ve acquired a wide range of abilities. Drawing, pixel-art, web design, creative writing, electronic music composition… even basic programming and game logic, enough to get by and use Godot Engine comfortably. I’m not excellent at anything, but I’m pretty good at a lot of things. However, there’s still a crucial ability I need to learn, and that is the ability to finish.

Unfortunately I’m not really interested in short stories, which makes this goal a little bit harder to achieve. Sure, I’ve written short fiction in the past, I’ve finished singular songs or drawings, but what I really want is to create complex characters and see them grow and change and interact for a long while in a medium- or big-sized project. This has always been my focus. And I’m a highly perfectionist person, so… yeah. You could say that this combination hasn’t been very good for my learning-to-finish quest.

At nearing thirty, I finally feel like my abilities and potential are up to par with my dreams. I no longer wish to become a professional creator, or at least that’s not my main goal. I feel quite comfortable working on my creative projects on my free time, as I can do whatever I want, however I want. So now I “just” need to finish something, I guess? The toughest challenge of them all.

A couple of years ago, I was honestly getting better at this. I had finally settled on narrative videogames as the perfect form to bring my dream to fruition, by combining different disciplines (writing, visual art, music, game-like interactivity) to create a single fictional world. I had been working on the same project for a few years, was finally getting somewhere, working on it every week and publishing a devlog entry every month or every couple of months… and then Covid hit, I lost all of my good habits and barely worked on the project for the past year and a half.

It was hard. It was frustrating. I didn’t really feel the motivation to do much of anything creative afterwards, and shifted my focus elsewhere.

It has taken me a lot of time to recover from this failure, I must admit, but finally, finally I’m getting back on track. That’s the main reason why I’m starting this blog: to document my process and showcase my advances, in a more meaningful (and, most importantly: wordy!) way than by using social media.

First of all, I’ve had to accept that the pre-Covid version of the project isn’t really going to work anymore. I’m not the same creator as I was a few years ago when I first planned it, and this forced halt on development has made me rethink too many things and lose track of too many aspects of the project for it to stay as it was. For example, the core identity of the project was the fact that it looked and felt like a Game Boy Color game, and that isn’t something that I honestly wish to do anymore.

I didn’t want to reset the project entirely, and I haven’t, since a lot of work has been put into it and a lot of concepts and systems can be reused. But it won’t stay the same anymore at its core, which is the reason why I have decided to change its name (more on that on future entries!) and kind of “start anew”.

However, not everything about the past year and a half has been bad, or a waste. Over this time, I’ve played a lot of different games (probably a wider variety of them than ever before in my life), read many comics and books, watched a lot of animation, and have been slowly learning to let go of what my project was “supposed to be” and instead focus on what I really “want it to be”, what I really enjoy in fiction. In particular, playing/reading many visual novels has made me realize that a “game-like” format can be a lot more like a novel than I thought, and it has provided me with renewed determination to create my particular not-quite-videogame, not-quite-comic, not-quite-novel interactive piece of fiction and share it with the world.

So here I am. I am pretty determined to finish my current project this time, and yeah, that’s what I said the last time, and the time before that, and before THAT… but I need to keep believing that I can do it, and improving myself, if I ever want to achieve my goal. And hey, on this occasion (for the first time ever!) I have crafted a painfully detailed roadmap to follow, so I don’t lose track of specific tasks and always have something solid to fall back on. So progress, I guess? I learn something new on every try, hopefully I will get it right this time…

Well, this introduction is quite long enough as it is, so I should probably wrap it up. Please excuse me for any mistakes in my English (not my native language) and please DON’T excuse me for my wordiness, I really do enjoy writing a lot. Which is why I hate Twitter. Well, not really, I hate it because it’s depressing. But also because I can’t write whole paragraphs like this. Blog sweet blog! Oh glob, I had missed having a proper webpage with room to ramble.

I will eventually add more sections to the blog, such as a gallery and/or portfolio section, which will replace my former Artstation and DeviantArt galleries. For now you can find me here and on Twitter, Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

Thank you very much for reading, if you made it this far, and see you on future entries! I will be talking a lot about my project and detailing my advances and stuff, so if that’s your kind of thing, stay tuned.

Best wishes,

Pingudroid