About
A plan of actions I made in June 2023.
Here's some terms that can give you an idea of who I am: human, analytic, introverted, goal-oriented, determined, action-oriented, abstract, calm, controlled, focused, future-oriented, strategic, [analytically] inventive, systematic, sincere, concrete, rather direct, careful, mostly patient, organized, always busy, map freak, Polish, rather leftist, sometimes indecisive and reticent, desiring little attention, steady, tending to be perfectionistic, sometimes lacking confidence, never sure when to end a darn paragraph... etc.
Cool stats
number of compositions: 58
Languages
My adventure with music
I was never indifferent with music and had contact with it since my earliest years. Since I was few years old, I had a piano at home – first a children one with 5 octaves and 100 sounds, then another digital but with normal size and sound. At first I was so ambitious I wanted to discover everything by myself – reinvent all of music, never looking at what others have achieved. I composed several, very simple melodies which I played from time to time. By the age of 10 I had a few piano lessons, but I quickly got bored with them for some reason. I still played piano from time to time but never explored and did less and less.
At the end of 2017, I was seriously dissatisfied with myself regarding essentially everything and decided a change is needed. I made a 15-point to-do list, with one of the points being about piano. Nothing specific, just "learn more". By that time I was aware, though, that I can only get better on the inside by learning from the outside. At the time I had little awareness of music and picked up two pieces from my then favorite game Luigi's Mansion 2 and learned them successfully one after another. Throughout 2018, my awareness increased significantly thanks to YouTube channels such as Vinheteiro or Sheet Music Boss while I challenged myself with harder pieces, still from games and movies, and without having a well-developed routine. By the end of the year I also began coming up with my own pieces.
2019 was the year which set the path. I had my first classical piece learned (Moonlight Sonata Mvt. 1), and also my brother BeetMacol showed me FL Studio and said it's a program I can compose in. Because I was still unexplorative, I didn't even bother checking out other options. After a few months of occasional experiences with the demo, I bought the DAW in June and started composing for real. Despite such beginning, I keep using FL Studio to this day and I'm rather satisfied with it. By late 2019 I was convinced that music should be a priority. After I picked up a tutorial and learned about effects plugins, motivation only increased, even though I mostly limited myself to the reverb. In 2020 I started composing my first soundtracks, first for my own failed project and then for a canceled game project by my game development team, Bitrium. I also became more ambitious with piano, picking up Maple Leaf Rag which taught me a lot of movement and octaves. By the end of the year I forced myself into some music theory and also learned equalizing which made my music a lot better.
In 2021 I began working on a new soundtrack for Bitrium, this time a lot better than my previous compositions thanks to what I learned. I also discovered the Double Harmonic Major scale and quickly became addicted to it. By the middle of the year I also started getting serious about piano, started using the pedal (yep, about time), established an actual routine, and became absolutely immersed with arpeggios thanks to Clair de Lune. Then I also got absolutely immersed with Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G Minor. Because of their advancement, I believe these piano pieces had a deep impact on my further compositions. By late 2022, because I was learning too much at once, I decided to get into actual practice exercises (about time, again). I also began reworking all of my music compositions so far in anticipation of their future release, which I completed in 2023.
Currently, I'm still immersed with a lot of music but hold my back and put in a lot of practice in both learning and creating music. I'm starting to have a grip on music theory and use it in the most appropriate way, that is by constantly attempting to break the patterns. Despite all these years I still have a lot to discover and experience.
Why I write
Although I was writing since youth, I never was an idea generator and, since I hadn't had much interest in reading and exploring, I used to write very occasionally. The largest story I wrote in my youth had only about 27 thousand words and was actually four separable short stories centered around the same character. Even though when I decided to buck up by the end of 2017 and one of my then-made 15 resolutions – most of which were successfully implemented the following year – was about writing, I lacked the sufficient ideas to support my goals.
It was only by mid 2019, a few months after I gave up on writing, that I started getting into reading. I first read only non-fiction books, mostly about history, though mainly autobiographic. In 2020, a bit encouraged by BeetMacol, I got into my first fantasy books which were the Witcher series. By that time, although I wasn't writing anything bigger than few very quick & short stories for fun, I began getting a sense of a need to write something bigger. In 2021 I quite accidentally started something that became my first actual post-youth story with 12 thousand words of length. I read more high fantasy, mostly Sanderson's books, but my thirst for fantasy slowly started dying out, and so did my motivation for writing after several failures to repeat my success.
In 2022, after reading a mixture of different books, I quite accidentally got into Stephen King's Outsider thanks to Myoko who quite accidentally had the book, after I thought that perhaps I would like mystery novels. It was a 180-degree turn for me after I realized this is what actually turns me on and made me establish a reading routine. It turned out to be key in moments of struggle with the sequel of the successful story, which I would manage to complete in my greatest creative blast (>1k words/day for more than a week) in early 2023. After finding several thrillers boring and shallow and getting into the Millenium series, I became even more assured of my interests.
"Why I write" is a difficult question. Although most writers write because they have a story to tell, I rarely get into such moments, but when I do, it's usually worth it. I believe there's always something I'd want to write about, I just can't always reach it. The more I explore, though, the more I think I understand this creative mystery.
Programming, designing levels, board games, and all that stuff
As a kid I've been drawing tons of board games, platform levels and sometimes labyrinths, some of which were absolutely off the wall. It seemed like an ideal thing to jam creative and analytical thinking and created an almost unending stream of creativity (to this day, I even have an entire notebook with levels). It only stopped by the end of primary school, perhaps due to the repetitiveness. Later, I was also into text games, which slightly got me into programming in Batch (thanks to the constant help of BeetMacol, who by that time got into programming as well), but this ended rather quickly.
Hoping for a return, in my resolutions for 2018 I expected to create three new board games (this was an out-of-nowhere type of number). What I ended up with was one but decent board game which took me roughly 35 hours to create and was quite playable (although some rules were decently complex). In 2021 I would create another and so far most ambitious board game which took me three months and is fairly playable though long. I'm still not sure whether I'm capable of creating more good board games, and won't devote myself to this in the future.
By mid 2018, what would later become Bitrium slowly began to form, with one of the major drives being my interest in game design and design overall. In 2019 I designed a complex organization system called Orderer which was to be programmed by Bitrium before it fully shifted its interest to game development. Encouraged by BeetMacol, I started learning C++ and by the end of 2019 began working on games, one of which would serve as the base for Kubagliko's idea of The Battle of Azgravan. My ambition for self-sufficiency in game development has peaked in June 2020 when I implemented SFML to program my own game about labyrinths while also creating the music and graphics to it, but eventually I failed to optimize and realize the project, giving up on programming in C++ altogether and shifting my focus to designing levels for a new Bitrium test game project about dungeons which was ultimately canceled. By the end of the year I designed and programmed this website.
My thirst for design seems to remain constant. Starting in 2022, I've designed a large Minecraft map with parkours and traps, even though my building skills (and graphic skills in general) were and still remain poor. In 2023 I learned Python in Łazarski University and, after three years, got back into programming, this time spending about 100 hours carrying out my own organization system akin to the Orderer project. Although the code still isn't best, I'm proud of having realized one of my deepest dreams.
