Hello!
There are two futures you could be reading this from. From the perspective of this website, one of them is warm, and the other one is melancholic. However, there’s only one present you could be reading it from, so I’m going to write this for you, contemporaneous reader!
A great many things have happened since I last posted here. It’s been almost two years, so you’d hope so! The very brief, in-order-of-appearance overview is:
- I left Liminal August 1st, 2017, deciding to seek my own fortunes as a freelance VR developer / spatial artist. The departure was as amicable as it could have been given the circumstances, and I’m still on good terms with the Liminal team, who are getting some amazing work done in my absence!
- I got super depressed and kind of stopped working on my own projects for a while. I realised that my identity had changed without me really noticing while at Liminal and, once my circumstances returned to a pre-Liminal state, I realised how different I’d become – and that I wasn’t a fan of the changes
- I started teaching VR design part-time at Academy Xi in Melbourne, which has been an immensely rewarding, fun and educational role that I’m still enjoying (although I’m currently teaching AR, and about to start a simultaneous XR course)
- I’ve officially ‘made it’ as a VR freelancer, having not starved-to-death in the past year. What’s more, each and every one of the projects I’ve worked on has been super interesting and educational, which I’m extremely grateful for! I’ll probably post about each project individually at some point in the near future.
- I’m now renting a ridiculously cool apartment right in the middle of Melbourne with my incredible girlfriend Holly. Not cheap, but not expensive, and something we are thrilled to wake up to every day even after almost six months.
…and that’s about it. If it sounds a little uneventful for a whole year, it’s because it kind of is. It’s been a bit of a rough year of adjusting to a new life. I’m definitely still in that adjustment period. Trying to reconcile the overcompensatingly-professional, appearance-is-everything startup personality with my previous, experimental, self-indulgent, creation-is-everything approach to work has been very challenging.
However I’m just coming out of a three month period being incredibly busy and, once my most recent project is shown at Burning Seed in a few weeks, am about to be completely free of projects, with money in the bank, for a good four months. Being relatively less-busy for the past few weeks has given me some time to think and re-focus some of my energy on my own life, and I’m feeling good about returning to my previous approach to work. Trying to be less focused on celebrity and more focused on art. Trying to be less focused on my appearing competent and more focused on developing my own skillset.
I have a strong feeling that if I can recapture that approach, and start producing good work again, getting some more contract work or perhaps (god forbid) a full-time job before February next year shouldn’t be an impossible task.
So look forward to reading more blog posts soon, contemporaneous reader! Some of the posts I have planned are:
- Catchup posts for the contract work I’ve done over the past year that I’m allowed to talk about
- Catchup posts for some of my new projects
- Updates on my previous projects that have been under development (some of which reasonably heavily) for the past year
- Fortnightly updates on what I’m developing at the moment!
Also expect to see some changelog updates to my project pages, and new download links as well!