Blogs - Kasumi Krystal

"As easy as teaching color recognition to a blind person."

Ever since 2014, even prior to a year of sitting out due to cancer, I've struggled breaking a square.

Essentially that square is a block, a block of unimaginative and motivationless void developed inside my mind which seeks to crush, and has, all of my motivation and imagination for designing levels and addons.

Back prior to 2014 I used to work with ambition on mods for people who had bigger ideas than abilities, such projects were "Tale of Two Cities" the failed 12-chapter egomaniac concept of an A++ game quality mod. And another of these mods was "Sortal", a game about colored cubes used in Portal which could easily be given the "We stole most ideas from Blue Portals and then we scrapped the idea of using Portal" tag.

Yet out of all the biggest failures I've partaken in, I consider the largest one to be myself.

I have started with Source as a tool to get me out of my daily issues, creating pointless maps and senseless situations to bring me joy. Yet now the void of the engine is changed from an empty canvas to the void of will to create any further maps.

I've already been to the ideas of changing games, going outside, gathering inspiration and after one year of cancer I also consider that as "Taking a break". Yet NONE have so far had any effect on the state of development function...

All in all I wish that nobody experiences a block that is impossible to escape.

Because one thing worse than being unable to imagine is being unable to create.

"To be, or not to be ?" -William Shakespear

That is the question I ask myself related to the world of creating modifications.

In the past years I have been inactive, forgetting about this world like an adult forgets the good moments of their past. Sadly the present is now catching up and I stand at a crossroads with both my health and my stage of life.

It may feel like ages ago but the view makes me precieve it in seconds time, times when I could not propperly use grammar... Times when I had overly ambitious goals that I could not accomplish such as a 12 chapter mod or being the single level developer for a Portal mod which then without my approval changed it's base premise and became Portal 2.

Despite all of those setbacks, I look back and I see a person full of optimism, a person that was not afraid to step up and face the challenge ahead of them. Today I feel like I've lost the connection and became old, bitter and shelled.

I no longer develop mods, no loger do I have the same feeling towards level designing... The feeling of challenge and gleeful joy in a creation that I would label today as a piece of trash work at best... Yet in all those creations that were frankly awful I see myself, and how I was not afraid of critique and publishing my work towards the community.

Time corrupted everything and even me, today I am a lonesome Leukemic sitting among her communities which are being taken over and ruined by adminsitrators believing to be the center of the galaxy.

I am no longer the joyful Frohman, parody of the Half Life comic, persistent developer and optimist. The feeling of me having become way less overwhelms me even to this point as I write this message, knowing I will not write another one as this is merely my passing-by cloud over the blog of me.

I only wish to know...

Am I the only one with such view, or have others had experience on this topic too ?