So, 2025 has begun! I hope it’s been a good one for you and your loved ones.
Somewhat of a mega-post update below.
Self-Investment
Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to achieve most of my animation goals – they weren’t really written down, more like abstract ideas of what I thought’d be cool – making keef animated music videos, an animated show(s) for a network, making a movie etc., and now feels time for some game-related goals. My sensibilities have gotten a little dulled over the years, so like a knife on a whetstone, once again am having to resharpen my mind, body and skills, and trying to find the FUN again as I’ve unfortunately lost a lot of that somewhere along the way.
My game-making goal is to be one of – if not the best and most successful – indie game devs, worldwide.
I’ve decided, perhaps out of necessity after semi-burnout, to spend at least the start of this year learning new skills and focusing on personal work. It’s been a fairly busy start in the process of getting my first earnest attempt at a more polished point-and-click game over the finish line. I’m very excited about it. I started sketching puzzle ideas whilst on holiday with Louise in the UK in Oct last year, and I’m getting closer to finalising a v1 public release. Thereafter I shift focus to my Bru & Boegie film.
So far, my 2025 slate is pure Bru & Boegie, which is amazing, and I feel lucky and grateful for that. 🙏
Games
Video games excite me even more than animation, and have done so for a while. If anything I’ve made videogame animation in lieu of being able to make games. I feel like an animation focus of years prior has been a great foundation for transitioning into game-making.
Thus far, making a game pretty much on my own, with the addition of commissioning some friends to do voices, music and sfx, has been continuously rewarding and meaningful. In the past I’ve made games with others who could code. I was initially inspired to learn solo game-making when my buddy Sheldon Bengtson, who has done a lot of writing work for my animation projects like Bru & Boegie and a larger group project Twende, made and released his own game ‘The Full 8 Hours’ last year, a game he made using Construct. I was impressed that someone like me who had never made a solo game before could put something out like he had. Desire combined with frustration of having to work vicariously and remotely through other game programmers with mixed results, and boiled over into being a powerful motivational impulse for me to finally knuckle down and start to learn how to do it. Because of how much finicky back-and-forth game collaboration can require – especially when not being in situ with the collaborator(s) – the amount of time and effort it takes to communicate intended ideas, changes and fine-tuning to someone else, I figured, is sometimes about the same time as doing it myself. To somewhat compound frustrations, the majority of content I’ve made in years prior has been for internal use – sketches, draw-overs, communicating ideas etc.
I realise how important meaning is to work, and making a Bru & Boegie game has meaning for me.
Below is an early gameplay preview video of the game:
Currently I’m going through a long list of additions, polishing and tweaks for it, and am keeping running lists of what to do around launch. Wayne Simpson has made excellent music for it, and Pete O’ Donoghue is in the process of making the sfx. I’ve got fantastic additional character voices from Martinus Van Tee, my old buddy Rendog who visited recently, and my awesome gf Louise. There’s a lot to do. Interactive games combine even more disciplines than animation does; there’s an entirely new element of engagement, and because of the many variables and reliance on user input to drive the experience, there’s potential for unique experiences that traditional/passive/linear film or animation doesn’t have. It’s a whole new dimension to explore of the maker’s relationship with the player.
Here’s a little minigame I made that’s part of the bigger game, that Bru can play when he uses their KiffStation videogame console:
Here’s a little video of the mini-game.
It’s fairly simple, but when everything’s new, it’s a major personal achievement! I have a long list of game ideas I’d like to try make, probably enough to keep a person going for a lifetime or at least however long I stay interested and able to make games.
My plan is to release this first Bru & Boegie ‘Episode 1’ game for free, as an indie. My somewhat cynical experience with some group projects has been having what makes a project successful, that is; autonomy, keeping my own hours, collaborating with the people I choose to, spending time on the project and not on meetings, controlling the purse-strings – removed, and being asked to do things someone else’s way, so I’d like to try and avoid that, for now at least.
The Animation Block
Have had a recurring thought that if I ran a local TV channel, would be great to have an animation program/block where creators get a set amount of funding to make their show, and everyone keeps ownership of their IP. Kind of like how public access TV works. A variety show of animated content. Anyways, that’d be cool. Not dissimilar to what Nouns did for their animated film festival.
Site Updates
I’ve added a bunch more stuff to my list of projects – there was so much I’d initially left out! I also now have a very barebones online SHOP, that mostly sells Bru & Boegie stuff. It’s very lo-fi, but it’ll work, mostly there in case anyone wants it. I’ve also reorganised all other work projects under the dropdown ‘Work’ menu in the menu bar at the top of the site.
Also updated my ‘About’ picture to an epic photo I found of young me.
The Thieves of Time
I’d been thinking (on the border of obsessing) with regret about how much I’ve allowed my time to be wasted over the years, and have started being a lot kinder to myself in that regard, and am trying to focus on all the positives of which there are plenty. If I add up the many mostly work-related hours and hard effort I’ve given to some people and projects for whom the time largely amounted to nothing, it’s kind of upsetting. I’ve thought ‘maybe it’s worthwhile’ or ‘it’ll eventually pan out and go somewhere’ and ‘I should keep an open mind and not be judgemental’, but sometimes it doesn’t result in anything of value. I know this is because I’ve allowed my time to be wasted and not been strict on boundaries. The time all adds up and distracts from what’s important. I think all of us would like to focus our time and energy on people and things of importance. For all I know I’ve also wasted other people’s time, and even wasted my own time ‘being a busy fool’ – it’s bad all around. I’ve long known that time is our most valuable asset, and time spent on dead-ends is opportunity cost for time that could be spent on things of value. I’ve sometimes cut my losses where necessary; in recent years I’ve given someone their full project deposit back after weeks of work where they kept changing their mind, and have given part payments back too when I find a project’s scope starts creeping past its allotted time or budget.
Recently I’ve had a program running in the back of my mind reminding me of various instances where collaborations have ended up being way more hassle than they need to be – whether that’s been a producer making fairly simple work unnecessarily difficult, or someone waffling away in meetings for hours. I’m guessing that mind program spinning up again is a warning to not fall into that same trap again, and be able to say ‘no thanks’. Instead, I’m finding it helpful to focus on the good stuff that invariably comes out of all interactions, even in unexpected ways. And I’ve had so many good collaboration outcomes where the process is an absolute joy and everybody is doing what they’re excellent at.
The Bots are Taking Over
AI’s made it possible to make far more believe human-like bots, and it seems an army of them have been deployed to the Internet to upset people. I’ve been seeing a lot more botted comments on YouTube videos etc, from users with names like @jsg_3891 (almost always with a string of numbers after them), saying insane stuff to create upset, along with replies from irate people to the baited comments. My guess is, the more upset someone is the more likely they are to respond or ‘engage’ with the ‘content’. The social media algorithms don’t care about the quality of the comments or whether they’re positive or negative, it’s all counted as part of the same ‘engagement’ which is the bots’ owners’ (platform owners?) end goal – to trigger someone into commenting. It’s worth checking the username of the commenter before impulsively reacting – if a comment makes you think ‘how could someone think that?’ along with a string of numbers after the username, there’s a good chance it’s a bot.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve nuked pretty much all my social media accounts besides YouTube, and am pleased to have this site that has no advertising, and isn’t beholden to any business tycoon’s agenda. The Internet is likely going to become even less of a pleasant place to spend time.
Truth
Been thinking vaguely that powerful and important truthful things can only be said when little or no money is behind it. For all of its perks, money seems to have a funny way of dispelling truth, it even fears truth, and prefers to ‘play it safe’ by staying in the shadows under the radar of truth. Where a lot of money is, truth doesn’t seem to be, and a lot of smoke and mirrors seem to be there instead. Where no money is, truth seems to be. This is not always the case, but money does seem to have a curious way of bending things of importance, often for the worse. I have a healthy respect for money, but do find the bending effect it can have concerning.
Tangentially-related, I was asked to sign an NDA recently to test someone’s game. I’d get nothing out of it, but if for some reason their game had similar stuff to my game I’m making that might be difficult to prove otherwise, the potential penalties in the NDA were extreme, stuff like ‘monetary damages might not be enough remedy’ etc and one of the terms mentioned that the confidentiality continues in perpetuity even after the playtest is over, so I was obviously like ‘no thanks, keep your NDA, I’m not signing that extremely high risk low reward document’ lol. One should be careful of signing NDAs, preferentially avoiding them imo. In worst cases, an NDA is both parties agreeing to sign away ‘the truth’, and one needs to wonder why this would be necessary. Having myself issued NDAs to others, a lot of the time they weren’t necessary, but were fear-based.
In the past I’ve had a company for which I’ve signed an NDA ask me to answer interviews around the project and seemed happy as long as I said nice things. Soon as I started sharing some of the difficulties of the project, I was rapped over the knuckles and lightly threatened. I should have begun each interview with ‘I can’t discuss this, I’m under NDA, let’s talk about something else’. When signing an NDA, I think it’s probably best practice / safest to not even mention the project, even in a positive light.
Band Room
Here’s my tiny my band room, that’s been a work in progress for a number of years in various configurations. It’s a very small room, and I think this setup works pretty well. I have a full drum kit in there, stereo condenser mics, a kick mic, table and chairs, 2 guitars, sound treatment on the walls, an Octapad electronic drum pad (currently not set up), and drawers full of cables and stuff. It get a little toasty, hence the fan. I like it. I put a blue bulb in the ceiling light, which is why everything’s blue.
✨ M o o d y ✨.
Here’s a chill song I made while experimenting the other evening, using bass, drums and egg shaker:
Also I got my Bru & Boegie movie poster printed and framed. I dig it. I’m still tickled that someone added the movie to Wikipedia, confirming it as South Africa’s first full-length 2D animated movie – (which of course, it is – I checked before making the movie):
Ok, that’s about it for now. Stay safe and be careful who you give one of your most valuable assets – attention – to! A lot of nuts stuff going on in the world, the battle between Good vs Evil rages on, am seeing more value being put on people with an iota of a backbone which is great, and I hope we’ve all realised mainstream media is now pretty much all lies, all the time, and definitely not to be trusted. ❤️