It’s been a while, I know.
Things got really messed up the summer of 2021 and just kept getting worse. First we all got Covid. My wife and I were out for two weeks, and there were several days for each of us where we simply didn’t get out of bed except to stagger ten feet to the bathroom. Luckily I got it first so as I was starting to recover she was bedridden – the first few days of me being bedridden she could get water and stuff for me, and just as she was mostly immobile I was feeling enough better to take care of her. Mother in law wasn’t so lucky. She wound up hospitalized for nine days and probably would have died if she hadn’t. We were certainly in no condition to take care of her, and she never quite bounced back even with the hospitalization.
We all recovered from that, and I got a pressure sore on my foot that turned into a bone infection. And that turned into a discussion with my doctor that pretty much opened with “our best bet is to cut off your toe and some of the bone inside your foot.” So now I’m an amputee and spent two months out of work on disability stoned out of my mind on painkillers. Going back to the robot factory with a foot in that condition was fun and a half.
I finally more or less recovered from that, and Mama (my mother in law) wound up in the hospital. She never came back out. Between her lung cancer coming back and spreading to her heart, and the long-term effects of Covid, she died on 12 October.
Then there were three more week-long trips to the ICU for me. The first was merely a near-amputation of my left leg thanks to an infection going berserk. The next two were extreme sepsis that almost killed me.
And then in late October 2023, just when I thought things were getting better, I had a “severe” temporal and frontal lobe stroke. It was severe (65% blockage), but very localized, and ran roughshod over my communication center. I couldn’t talk for a week or so, and now I still have trouble speaking coherently sometimes. On the upside, my neurologist said he had seen patients with a 40% blockage who lost half their bodies. So I really can’t complain, but I will anyway. And the MRI and CAT scan are interesting. My left temporal lobe looks like it took a load of birdshot.
The main long-term effects are some language issues, functional memory issues, and brain fatigue. I still have trouble talking and typing (and my handwriting ranges from “sloppy” to “is that even English”), but it comes and goes – sometimes you can’t even tell, other times I just suddenly can’t talk in mid-sentence, and other times I have a pretty severe stutter. But I can still swear pretty fluently. And I can code C# and HTML. THAT was a pleasant surprise, considering I could barely read for two months after the stroke.
I finally went back to the robot factory in February (technically late January), and things were going well for a couple of months. Then from late April to mid-July (I’m still out as of this update) I wound up in the hostibule twice, bot times for severe sepsis. Bonus: the second time they thought I was having a heart attack, but it turned out to be borderline respiratory failure. Two nights in a row.
So yeah, not a great chunk of time at Devil Monkey.
While all that was going on, I realized I don’t really care as much about the blog as I do the games and their worlds. There was also a lot of non-Devil Monkey IP involved in the blog. None of it was lawsuit-worthy, but all of it was free advertising for someone else and distracted from what I’m doing.
During that downtime, I redesigned the site to be fully WordPress-based. The old hybrid design was a major pain to maintain, and I could never get everything to mesh up properly even when I sliced up the old site and added the WP code that should have made it work properly. Functionally it was fine, but stylistically was another story entirely. So I nuked it and repaved it as pure WordPress.
The stroke delayed this rebuild by six months. I had been planning for the relaunch on New Year’s Day. But my inability to type coherently at anything faster than a sloth’s pace for most of November and December kind of put a severe case of the Scroogies on that.
For the next several months, I’m going to focus primarily on recovery. I can still code, I can still write, and I can still do graphics. My medical team has been very impressed with my writing, all things considered. I printed out my posts from the other blog about the stroke adventure and let my speech therapist see them, and she wanted to know how long it took to type them. When I said it was several pages over the course of a few days, she was impressed and suggested discharge.
But my memory issues and general brain-fatigue is still slowing me down. There are still days where I get home, flop into my desk chair, and it’s all I can do not to doze off. It’s more than a little hard to get anything substantial done in this state. But I’m supposedly getting better. That’s what my wife and doctors tell me, even if I can’t always see it.
So I’m planning to get back to proper monkey business in January 2025. In the meantime, I’ll do what I can, and retake some of my classes.
Going forward, the blog will have two primary topics: dev logs for whatever I’m currently working on, and articles related to the Monkeyverse. My inspiration for the latter is old gaming magazines like Dragon and White Dwarf. The sheer volume of blog content won’t be nearly what it had been, but that’s OK. Some of that content was pure filler anyway, and as I said I’m trying to focus on the games themselves. I plan on a weekly dev log, which may be pretty lightweight, and bi-weekly or monthly Monkeyverse posts. The Monkeyverse posts will largely focus on the Alliance timeline for the time being. There are other parts of the Monkeyverse – you’ve seen them – but the Alliance is the big one right now.
Parallel with the game design work is education. Consulting my old school’s website, I figured out how much education you get in a credit-hour and what constitutes a full-time schedule. Then, being a madman, I threw together a class schedule that works out to the equivalent of full-time. It doesn’t break down very well into specific credit-hours per class – a number of them would effectively be half a credit or less, and others would end up with weird fractional credits – but overall I’m doing just over 12 credits this fall. Since I’m using Udemy for the vast majority of these, it would be really easy to just do the bare minimum, get the certificate, and claim an A. I knew quite a few guys who did that in robot school too. But you don’t get much out of it when you do it that way. So my metric for successful completion is entirely outcome based.
On the game design front, I’m working on four projects with four separate “engines.” The FPS, a hovercraft combat game (inspired by T-MEK, RoadBlasters, STUN Runner, and Speed Rumbler), a combative rokkit game where the rokkit has a gun and the levels will focus less on precision flying and more on fighting the enemies, and an ARPG like Diablo but set in the Alliance. From there, I have a few much larger projects planned; what’s being worked on now are all essentially demos and tech tests, while I have some actual release ideas planned for the next phase – I sure wouldn’t pay for any of the demos I’ve already released or their current state.
So yeah, I’m not dead and Devil Monkey Games still exists. It just hit a rough patch there for a while.