who would've thought that me making a small fireworks game two years ago, might actually come in handy at some point...

2020, am I right? What a year! A thing I keep thinking about since at least 2018, is that for the past five years the general vibe at the end of each year has been “wow this year sure was awful, but thankfully it’s over now!”, only for the year after that to not really be an improvement.

This was true for me both on a general level, but also on a personal one. Since 2014, I constantly felt that everything got worse with each year. 2018 was a complete hellscape and even though things kind of plateaued in 2019, they did so because it actually couldn’t get much worse anyway. What makes 2020 weird for me is that on a global scale the general trend of things getting progressively worse continued, while things actually turned around for me on a personal level. At the end of 2019 I started taking Antidepressants and in March of 2020 I finally managed to start going Therapy and in October of 2020, I got diagnosed with ADHD. I haven’t really done much specific treatment for ADHD, but it’s incredible how getting that diagnosis changed my perspective on huge parts of my life. For most of my adult life, I was constantly kicking myself for not being disciplined enough, for being impulsive, and bad at expressing things that are important to me and now I kind of know why. It makes it much easier to forgive myself for stuff that happened in the past and moments in the present where things might not go as well as I initially wanted them to be.

Other cool things that happened this year to me was that due to the lockdown, the German welfare office left me alone for most of it, which lifted a lot of pressure off of me and gave me time to not only just do whatever I wanted, but also to focus on my mental health. Turns out it’s much easier to work on yourself, when you’re not getting pressured by outside forces all the time.

I also started playing more tabletop RPGs with members from the amazing Roll +Bond Discord server. I haven’t done much roleplaying in years and doing this now with so many fascinating creative people has been a constant joy. We also did two charity livestreams this year where we played games, had fun and collected Money for a bunch of very good causes (you can watch of those streams over here, the other one sadly didn’t get archived). We also did a big RPG bundle that made a bunch of money, which unfortunately is still getting sorted out, because itchio sometimes takes a while.

All of this lead to me feeling much more confident in my creative work in general. I changed how I approached making art for my games, by reducing the amount of colours I use to the bare minimum and it enabled me to build stuff so much more quickly.

I still get distracted and just recently stopped working on one game, to hyper focus on another, but I’m kind of cool with that, because I’m now confident enough in my ability to make things, that I’m sure I’ll end up finishing both of them (one of them hopefully early next year, it’s almost done already).

I also released a fun, small tabletop RPG called “Corvid Capers” back in March, which is about smart Birds doing crimes and causing a ruckus, and it’s been really fun to play it with other people and see them engage with the systems that I build and make something of their own out of it.

So 2020 has been kind of great, but that doesn’t mean that it fills me with a lot of confidence in the future, not even of my own. 2020 for me is also the year, where I became completely dejected in the efficiency of the current political system. If even the parties that are supposed to fight for the poor and marginalized members of society are willing to sacrifice thousands to an illness, just so that companies can keep extracting value out of us, I don’t think that just voting for the right kind of people will actually solve anything. The problem isn’t really that the wrong people are in charge of the state (even though they can make things worse), it’s that the state itself doesn’t serve the interest of the people, but the interest of those that own capital and property. It always has. It won’t change how it operates, just because someone nice sits at the helm of it. A good government will still have a racist police force, because that’s what police are.

So as much as I understand the need to take part in these systems to mitigate the damage the state does, I feel like completely focusing one’s own efforts on that is not enough. What that exactly means I haven’t figured out for myself, but that’s what I’m going to try to do next year. I refuse to believe that we’re just stuck in a slow decline where every is just worse than the one that came before, but I understand this trend we’ve been experiencing won’t stop itself. It’s up to us all to find ways to stop it both in our immediate surroundings, and trying to force a larger scale change.

Personally I hope that I can continue doing the things I did this year, to improve my mental health, to become a more kind person and keep making the kind of art I want to make, regardless of who else wants to see it. As for 2021 in general? There’ll be elections in Germany next year and I’m dreading the results. Brexit is finally going down and I’m afraid what that means to my friends in the UK. The US is getting a government that is already doing its best to disappoint everyone who isn’t white and/or affluent. There’s still a Pandemic going on and I do not trust private companies handling something as important as production of a vaccine in a way that doesn’t end up making things worse. All of this doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that things can turn around, because they can. One thing I’m sure of is that things definitely won’t fix themselves. As hopeless and pointless as it seems sometimes, it’s important to keep fighting for a better world and that’s what I’m trying to do and maybe 2021 can actually be the year where things turn around.

So let us all try our best.

Things I enjoyed this year:

Books:

Games (video and otherwise):