Every day I wake up and all I want to do is work on my game. This has been the truth for many years now, in fact, that's pretty much all I can remember. Before Halfquake, I made Counter-Strike maps and experimented with music. I wrote short stories, built maps in a game called Kye, and wrote a text adventure in batchfiles.

There's a video of me as a child, sitting before a Yamaha keyboard (before my parents got divorced). My dad was filming, and my mother was standing next to me. I played a melody that I thought of, I turned to the camera, grinning and checking if dad was "getting this". My mother would then ask me if I wanted to play something from a note sheet book. I declined and just kept jamming my own stuff. Then mother would just put the book in front of me and sort of "suggest" that I play that.

I gracefully wound down my track with an "end" button (which caused the percussion to play a sort of fill-in), and begrudgingly played what mom told me to play. After that was done, I played another melody that I found interesting. Again mom would ask me to play something from the book.

When I accidentally saw that clip recently, I was stunned. I couldn't remember it, but I vaguely recalled the melodies I played from memory, and I sort of still understood why I liked them. And I realized that I'm still that kid.

I absolutely hate being told what to do. That is simply not what I'm here for. My mind is full of ideas, all of which are asking me to be turned into reality. And believe me, they won't shut up, not even in my dreams. Thankfully, I've found a compromise that allows me to live an adult life and still have time for my own projects.

But as time slips away from me, I'm trying to hold it closer. Knowing that my time is running out, I'm longing for even more to call my own. And I know this has been an on-going theme on this website, because I kept mentioning it ten years ago.

I'm using productivity tricks, I use lists, motivation hacks, time audits, but all that does is burn me out, so I have to take it slow and steady. At least one hour per day, that's been my motto for over 15 years now. And that is what I will keep on doing until the day I die.

Will it be enough? Probably not. But realistically, with an infinite amount of ideas, could it ever be? No, but I have to learn to be okay with that.