lately the islands have been calling me, and in many ways i’m happy to know they still remember my name! you know, given i’ve been away for some time. though to be fair, i’ve never really been far at all if you consider where the seed vault lies. and while it’s been refreshing to step underground for a while, i am eager to return to the surface.
in the real world, i’ve been on an island of my own, actually. a thousand miles away from family, friends, faces and places i miss oh so much. though i’m happy to report that much of my whereabouts recently have been touring these comforts in a much needed visit back home. i keep family matters close to my chest, but what i can share is the unexpected enjoyment of the 20 hours there and back.
i love any moment where i can simply exist alone with my thoughts. so much of that time feels robbed from us these days. there is always someone…. something… or some place demanding our attention. and at last when we’re free, we spend the break enslaving our minds to the braindead consumption of our devices. brainrot is real, and it feels healing to treat my mind to some much needed gardening.
now, with two 20-hour drives, and added time for pee breaks, truck stop snacks, and sketchy back seat slumbers – i had plenty of time for gardening. we’re talking like 50 hours here, and my brain did not disappoint! well, during the drive back my brain started to shut down, actually. driving UP, however, i was so happily lost in thought with both little islands and seedy vault… and i loved every second of it. so next time you think me lazy, uninterested, or unmotivated to work on the game you care for, just know nine times out of ten i’m probably sitting somewhere, bag of goldfish in hand, staring at a wall, daydreaming about the same game you are. believe me when i tell you these games are my art. and not the art i’m forced to make, but the art i want to make – bugs and all!
what’s more worthy to report, and a bit more relevant to the sabotaged progress of my projects, would be the loss of my job as ui designer for jazwares in august. it was a good run, islanders… but ultimately i am grateful for all i was able to learn from this experience and the connections i made.
there’s a lot more i wish i could say about this, but essentially it was out of our hands as the entire studio closed. i think it’s safe to say most of us were half-expecting this to happen after layoffs hit our team hard in the spring. but nothing quite prepares you for the present like the present.
in the mean time, i’ve spent this time largely… well, crisis managing! (with a detour for family of course.) but in more recent good news, thanks to a former colleague i’ve been able to find some part-time contract work with a very cool roblox community as i prepare for the strenuous trip to RDC ’25 this weekend. so far, things are going great! but it’s only part-time, so the hope this weekend is to find something more permanent that could provide safe haven to work on my art again without worry.
besides this, my circumstances have been ever so the more humbling lately. i would spare you the details, but i just find them so amusing. one of them is my apartment towing my registered car from our garage without telling me, experiencing a flat tire immediately following the release of my car from the sketchy car asylum, and a cigarette fumed truck ride with michael, the arabic speaking tow driver (who was strangely hitting on me…). google translate apps made for a fun ride!
but aside from my circumstances, i have been deeply frustrated with roblox’s lack of moderation, the current state of the platform, and the outspoken inflammatory side of its community. i’ll save you my explicit thoughts on everything in this ongoing situation, but it’s taken its toll mentally.
it is hard to find the drive to work on a game that resembles so many of the games that are currently being understood as enabling for predators and bad actors to subdue victims or expose young users to illicit content. i suppose this is the darker side of user-generated content that i do not see being 100% preventable. i think about the users and builds we’ve had to moderate ourselves already, and then i imagine them brought to a larger scale and making its way to the reactionary public. it is demotivating, to say the least, because i so badly want a building game like ours to commercially succeed. but perhaps it was always a blessing our little islands have stayed a small tight-knit community.
because of all this, i’ve taken some time to re-think some design decisions for the game. originally, the plan was to open up character customization to the catalog, becoming more akin to places like catalog avatar creator; empowering players to manifest the characters they want, while also opening doors for monetary revenue through the commissions on in-game catalog sales. however, i think it’s obvious now the problematic nature of this mechanic and as such i cannot in good faith continue to work on it until roblox improves their moderation. i do not want the game to hold even the capacity to support such behavior, even more so than it already has as a free form building game.
so instead, i think it would be wiser we stick to the customization strategy we have always adhered to, with pre-made catalogs of avatar items with controlled roleplay genres that do not empower opportunities for explicit content or dangerous behavior. the amount of content to work with may be limiting, but i do believe this the safer approach to character customization.
so, after all that’s been said. i currently find myself at a roadblock of sorts (haha, roadblocks), and i’m not quite sure yet how best to proceed. my mind fluctuates by the hour between working on little islands 2 or working on seedy vault. sometimes it feels smarter to work on the vault, as its goal was to provide for little islands 2 financially. but seeing the game lose its spark so quickly has been demotivating, and i was expecting it to take off more than it did. i still believe in it, and i do think there are a few more mechanics that would change the game and keep people playing, but i’m worried i’ll be wrong again. i suppose that’s the fun of it: finding out.
other parts of me wish i wasn’t so ambitious, that i could just make something and have it released to the world without any fear of things not being quite the way i want them in my head. so, my personal goal is to do more of that. especially with the sequel update, i think scaling back and just getting something functionally playable out would be a better start to new beginning for little islands, even if it’s not what people expected.
the length of this blog post was more than intended, but it feels good to get all my thoughts on paper. it’s helped me quite a lot, actually, and i think i know what directions to proceed in. right now, it’s feeling like the islands will get what they’ve been wanting. but first… i think the banana trade is about to arrive at the vault.
