I'm finally back! Well, kinda. Not in the best way possible.
For those who follow me on Twitter, you may know that I got scammed and lost my GPU in the process. The entire thing of what happened was posted on this thread so I won't go into the same details. Rather, I'll talk about a bit of how I'm feeling right now.
I'm feeling depressed as fuck. When everything went down, I was with my best friend right as I was plugging in the GPU and finding out that I was scammed. Because I was with him, we took the situation kinda as a joke, even though internally my mind was racing with "how the fuck will be able to work now". Once he went to his home and I actually found a moment of silence, it all started dawning on me. I was literally robbed, I lost my only tool of work, I had almost no money to replace it and I wasn't gonna be able to actually work and make money to pay for the tool I needed to work in the first place.
Rapidly, I started taking measures. I put stuff to sale like some consoles, an audio interface and such, including the broken GPU after I was told it wasn't fixable. My family started gathering money for me. Most importantly and swallowing my pride, I had to make that Twitter thread linked earlier because just by doing simple maths I knew I wasn't gonna have enough money. Just to give you an idea, a brand new 1660ti from the cheaper manufacturers, like Inno3D, Zotac or Palit, costs around 115000 ARS, which is around 800 usd in practice. Minimum wage here barely is above 240 usd, so give yourself an idea.
Much to my surprise, I received a lot of love from people online. Donations and lots of cheerful messages, including two people that were kind enough to offer me their GPUs (which I had to decline due to my country's customs that are highly corrupt). My friend understood the situation fairly quick and lended me his HD 6670. While it is not good enough to work (at least anything that I have to debug and has graphics), it at least let me keep working on anything that's only code base or that I have to debug in another target platform (kinda like the ports to Vita). However, this could not stop me from starting to feel progressively worse, to the point that I'm now.
Despite the rush of energy the first two or three days to get out of this trouble, I started to feel worse and worse and worse. Truth be told, I always had problems with depression, and sometimes with just a little push on the wrong side, the tower falls apart. Not only that, but this situation caught me in the middle of me moving out, which is not only expensive as hell, but it's also a great waste of time and energy to find a suitable price that's not too expensive or broken. I was already feeling pretty meh when this whole situation exploded, and here I am now.
I'm having troubles even getting out of bed, I'm not eating, I don't have the energy to talk to my friends, girlfriend or family. I have panic attacks at "how the fuck I'm gonna pay the bills now, I can't even work", yet at the same time I don't even have the mental energy to feel worried. I just wanna spend the day chatting on Discord in Vita Nuova or watching random Tweets, hoping to suddenly find that a millionaire from Dubai felt sorry for me and sent me a lot of money, which I think it's safe to say the chances of that happening are slim.
I actually started Vita porting again for a few reasons. First, as a way to thank the people in the community that has been supporting me with donations or kind messages. Second, as a way to try and get more donations, but third and I think most importantly, to give myself a reason to get out of bed. To do or finish something and feel myself like I'm not the failure I'm feeling I am at the moment.
My situation may not be good from a financial pov, but it's a trainwreck in a mental pov. But, at the very least, I managed to get something done, finally, which brings me to the + part of the title of this post.
Gato Roboto has been finally finished and ported to Vita. While it might have some problems (a few areas have performance problems, and palette swap filters don't work in their majority), the game is fully playable from start to end. It's the first time I play this game (as it's usually true with all my ports) and it was a really enjoyable experience. Hopefully all of you will enjoy it just as much.
Install instructions are here and you can buy the game here.
I have some more ports on the way that I really want to release, and hopefully will have the energy to. Also, I started work in some new tools that will allow even more GMS games to come in the future to the Vita, but I'll leave those for another update, when they are ready to showcase.
Thanks for reading up to this point, it means a lot of me.
And thank you for all of your support.