Here I am to relax a bit and complain. Without much reason, but every now and then it must be done.

First off, OhMyShape! continues to go full steam ahead. Sometimes I have less time than I’d like, but that’s normal since I’ve been a first-time father for 2 months now. First things first. But soon there will be another small update on the project, and I truly believe that my plans to release it by the end of summer are realistic.

On top of that, I’ve become very serious about wanting to be the master of Unity. It’s in my genes to overload myself with work that no one around me understands, and especially to stress myself out with self-imposed deadlines. About a week ago, I made one of my impulsive purchases: virtual reality glasses. It had been on my mind for weeks and was part of the content I wanted to bring to the blog, so it was now or never.

Along with the virtual reality glasses came the start of a Unity course on VR. So yes, indie game developer with OhMyShape!, virtual reality student, and dad (and hey, I do many other things).

The Unity course made me realize that there are official Learning Paths, and when you finish them, they give you some cute badges and a sort of diploma issued by Credly. So in my head, it’s a good idea to complete all the Learning Paths as soon as possible to master Unity (we’re talking about months and months of training). And all of this leads me to think that in the not-too-distant future, I would love to dedicate myself 100% to making games. Is it possible? We’ll talk more about that later.

Before concluding this complaint (more of a statement than a complaint, but there’s a bit of a gripe about the lack of hours in the day), I created this page [Me x Unity] to track my progress with Unity. It’s a reminder to myself that I must move forward.

The next topic I wanted to discuss is about the website. I’ve spent some time “improving” the presence. In reality, all I’ve done is migrate from “.es” to “.io.” It’s been a while since I stopped writing in Spanish and started doing it exclusively in English, but it also made no sense with the little and varied content I uploaded to the web. I decided to take this small step to make the domain more international, and the “.es” redirects to this one.

I changed the website not long ago to WordPress with one of its default themes. And here comes my next complaint/thought.

I’ve been working in web development for almost 13 years. With web technologies. In recent years, there’s been an explosion of technologies and frameworks, especially JavaScript (React, Vue, Next, etc.), and the craze to master them and make modern interfaces and websites had taken over me and everyone in the industry. To the point where, from my point of view, development has become complicated, as have infrastructures, tools in general, and I lost the desire and joy for development some time ago.

My website was made with Nextjs, Tailwind, and a library that allowed writing files in markdown and adding components (MDX) just two months ago. It was cool and all, but it was a hassle to maintain, write, and want to add anything new.

I reset my mind, ignored comments from know-it-alls and detractors, and moved everything to new hosting. One of the traditional ones, with my access to Phpmyadmin, an FTP account, and I added WordPress. In a matter of minutes, I was writing. If I wanted to add something, the theme’s editing system was enough, intuitive, efficient… if I wanted to add Google Analytics, two clicks to install the module, two clicks to configure.

If I want to migrate to .io, super old school touching things in the database… but again, quick and effective. And mind you, I do this obviously because it’s my personal website and not a client project or one generating income. But what I’m saying is that sometimes we need to distance ourselves from the rest of the world. We get poisoned by listening to others and sometimes lose sight of what’s simple and practical. And again, I’m not saying that simple and practical mean using WordPress. In my particular case, it worked well.

Having said that and hoping not to come across as a complete lunatic, and that my point of view has been understood, I don’t want something I said above to sound defeatist: “I lost the desire and joy for development some time ago.” That’s true, that’s why I haven’t been developing for so long, and I’ve sought positions focused on project and people management (which I’m not passionate about either). And that’s why, when I think about games, mechanics, open Unity, place elements, and program their functionalities… I feel butterflies in my stomach again. Is it possible that I’m regaining my enthusiasm and that “spark” for development?

That’s why I’m considering so many things for the near future. But again, we’ll talk about that later.

And finally, a question I have. Is it worth creating a YouTube channel? What for? First, to show the virtual reality work. Because it’s not a technology accessible to everyone (not everyone can afford VR Headsets), and with videos, I could at least show it. For some OhMyShape! gameplay or advertising video. And who knows, maybe to become famous doing tutorials or commenting on something… but that’s unlikely due to embarrassment and not having enough skill to do it in English.

And that’s all my stuff, complaints, and thoughts. Until next time!