It feels almost like 2024 was two years packed in one. A lot happened but there were also many months with not much visible activity on my behalf.

Jobs

After starting to work in retail in July 2023, I quickly got offered a better position and was something like a store manager light. There were many aspects which I liked about the position for example making decisions about the store, thinking about where to place goods so that they sell better, but there were also parts of the job which I certainly disliked. In hindsight it helped me to become a stronger person and to stand my ground better but it was really stressful in the midst of it. In May, I demoted myself to a normal employee and was pretty content with the decision and the pay cut was not big.

On a whim I decided to try my luck and applied for a job at a gambling hall and started working there soon after. If you don’t have them in your country, it’s basically a mini casino with slot machines and sometimes billiards. The job is pretty well paid for unskilled labor and there’s not much stress involved. You bring coffee and fresh drinks, change bills to coins or coins to bills, fix minor problems with the slot machines and tell annoying guests to behave.

I got along with most people on the team except one woman which spiraled into an annoying dispute. I got fired after a few months over a minor offense but I think they wanted to get rid of me to solve the ongoing problems with the coworker and myself. Sometimes you just have bad luck.

Since I liked the job I applied to a competitor and got hired pretty quickly. They pay even better but overall it’s more or less the same. Some things are a bit better, some things worse, it evens out. Right now, I’m one and half months at the new company and we’ll see how it turns out.

Game Development

Except three updates in the first half of the year there was not much going on. Sonucido: The Mage and Fight in the Arena got a big round of improvements and The Blood Mage a few fixes right at the beginning of the year.

That doesn’t mean that nothing else happened! I started working on a game in July and I am making slow but steady progress. I work on it a little bit everyday – except for when I was on a vacation in Portugal to visit parts of my family. I didn’t think that this process would go as smoothly as it did in the end since on some days the progress was extremely minor. But over time the small changes and big changes culminated in a project which will be released 2025. Generally, I avoid making predictions in these postmortem posts but I’m certain this will work out.

Aside of the new project, I started working on an update in December for Fight in the Arena which will polish the game a little more but the progress is slow since I’m focused on the main project.

Gaming

I didn’t spend much time gaming this year. I played Babbdi – the atmosphere was great – and Murder, a small Indie game I got some time ago. I finished Space Wreck and NaissancE which were both great and played Kingdom Come: Deliverance but only a couple of hours. I stopped because of the length. Between the main job, family, game development and other pursuits there doesn’t seem enough time in the day to commit to really long games.


I’m looking forward to 2025!

Cheers
Daniel

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