Why Don't I Write Anymore?

It's been a long time coming, but here I am. I have finally returned to updating my random little blog that nobody reads. Actually, that's quite a good thing. It's kind of relaxing just talking to myself. 

Why, then, did I ever stop? ... 

 

It's a long story. I am probably better off not getting too deeply into it for now. I'll go write an autobiography some day far off in the future :D 

That being said, I am going to approach a medium depth. Some level of detail that will not doom me to certain failure and despair, but neither will it leave you wondering "wtf is he even talking about just get to the point". Ok. Well I hear you. It's been several years since I've written something like this, so it'll take me a few paragraphs to get up to speed again. 

This all comes down to being perceived. It's a fairly common thing to bemoan these days and it's actually quite a cliche, but in my experience, it's the real deal. Being perceived is terrible. Sometimes. Especially when it's me doing the perceiving and being perceived, and I don't like what I'm perceiving. This has never been more true than my beloved problem child, the YouTube channel. The line between "game developer on the Internet" and "YouTuber" is not so clear these days. 

I've come this far in my game development career to learn that I am not a YouTuber. Well, at least not by choice. Particularly astute fans of mine will remember that I started my YouTube channel to publicize my blogs. Of course, I stopped updating my blogposts at some point and focused only on the YouTube channel. "Writing a blogpost" turned into "writing a script" at some moment I wasn't very clear on. The benefits of YouTube are evident, I can reach a much wider audience than I can with these little text posts... but is that really a good thing?

From the standpoint of a naive commercial endeavor, it seemed like a good thing. That was how I could build an audience, and a community, and eventually market and sell video-games to earn a sustainable living. A fine idea, but it falls short at the point where I'm simply focused on gaming the analytics. I need more subscribers? Well, that means tutorials. I get tons of subscribers from doing that. I'm deeply grateful to every game developer who took my advice from those videos, but that was totally a side-quest to every life goal I've ever had. The fact is, game developers are quite unlikely to be purchasing my games. Maybe even less likely than the average gamer, who knows?

So I've come to this point in my life and/or career. For earnest marketing efforts, YouTube is not really a main one. It's part of it, but I can afford to go easier on my poor subscriber base for now. I'll let them know when I'm actually cooking up something neat. 

In the mean-time, though? This is where I stay. I love writing much more than I love speaking. I love game development much more than I love teaching. The AlexHoratio brand is back, baby, and it's better than ever!

..

Okay, well, I can't actually be sure of that. I think I peaked at the post about the mushrooms. I'm probably not coming back from that. 

Really though, I'll be cooking up something new for you quite soon. Stay tuned! :)