So I have been unemployed since 2023 with only a few jobs in-between. I am still looking for work so I can earn some money, but life in the software industry has been quite tough to get back into. I have been applying for hundreds of job but I haven't really been having much luck that endeavor. While I had several interviews none of those has actually translated into a long term job position. So I have been working on taking some online courses to get certificates to improve my chances of getting a job offer. In the meantime for fun I have been mainly focused on playing Niche, or Palworld. I have also been working on building up my java skills by designing a couple of games, so far I am working on a platformer style game after finishing up a tower defense game. I might not be as experienced in this area as most of you furries are, but its a learning experience for me. My web coding projects are currently on hold at the moment as I really want to understand the java language well enough that I could utilize it to make some web based games. I have also been working on writing a couple of different stories just for fun.

Discord has been my main way of communicating with my friends from FA and I really need to get back to using this website a bit more. While the games I have been building have mainly been tutorial games, I really need to eventually start back on my own projects. The great difficulty for me is that I am not the greatest composer, artist, level designer or coder, but still I would like to create my own game that I can call my own. I have been learning quite a lot from the Kaarin Gaming's java tutorial series, he is a very good instructor and its very easy to learn how to create a video game from watching his tutorials. I am having fun building up these simple games as it allows me to see how video games are built from the ground up. Maybe I could post some screenshots in the future of any games that I am working. It would give me an idea of how much progress I have made on my games. At some point in time I should try to get back to drawing artwork and writing stories. Still I am happy to have finished the tower defense game tutorial in java as that gives me insight into many core components of a tower defense game work along with a functional map editor. The next java tutorial that I am working on is a simple java platformer game.

I have been experimenting with creating my own youtube videos through the game Transformice. While I have created videos in the past focused on Megaman and Minecraft, they have been kind of lacking in consistency and I didn't really have a good grasp of how loud the game music should be. I also was not used to talking on microphone and sometimes I just didn't know what to talk about. I added some music to my videos to give them some personality though it was mainly used with early minecraft which featured no music at all. The channel icon was not in the same location and sometimes the size of the icon changed. I have noticed that other games require the avatar to move around to different locations based on the games themselves. While my later videos did utilize several different scenes to give the videos some styles, it was still pretty experimental. While I did like some of the scenes that I created in those later videos, I had to rebuild everything from the ground up when I moved to a new computer. Still those old scenes did serve as inspiration for creating the new ones. Now my video scenes are much more structured with the use of folder groups that allow me to separate the different scenes from one another. I now have a sidebar where my channel avatar sits which is now consistent across all my videos with room for additional links or chat. My videos now utilize a loading screen, gameplay screen, thank you screen and a video screen. I can leave the loading screen off if I feel that I am making too many mistakes to keep creating it or I want to save on time. In addition to this I can also toggle the microphone on and off for my videos if I need time to concentrate on a really difficult section or if I want to create a video without commentary enabled.

While I have always had some form of a thumbnail on my videos, I have recently started to utilize video titles on the thumbnails. I am now editing my videos prior to posting them so that I can add the loading screen to a video that is missing it or to add an outro screen. Still I am pretty happy with the new system that I have now. So that is all I have to say for now.