Another slow day, although I suppose slow work is better than no work. Finished up the unrolling animations for both the tarp and the character. I think I’ll just end up using the original animation after all, just with more manual input. The week is already halfway over, and I’ve got way too little done. Every day I note my inefficiency yet I never actually seem to be able to do anything about it. This weekend, once I finish my submission for #screenshotsaturday, I’ll start recording and compiling footage for the trailer.
Worked on animations for the bivouac today. It took me all day to finish up the unrolling animation alone… at this rate I doubt I’ll be able to get anything else done this week (assuming, that is, I’m even able to get this done). I think a large reason behind my inefficiency was due to not being able to properly visualise how the action actually worked in reality, which obviously made it difficult to translate into an animation. I was focusing too much on verisimilitude that I realised it doesn’t actually matter (and unlike some of the other processes and animations, I don’t think anyone really cares how the tarp is unrolled since it’s such a mechanically trivial task in reality, with little bearing on the overall experience). Tomorrow, I’d like to finish up the animation if possible, which includes driving in the stakes, and pitching the tent. I don’t know if I’ll actually be able to accomplish that, but no work is wasted, as it goes…
I also made some significant visual changes to the itch.io page. I’m not gonna talk too much about that for now because it’s still in a very preliminary draft state but it is worth noting.
I woke up around 0700 after a strange and vaguely unsettling dream in which I found myself being followed by a woman with no face. She wore a white button-up collared shirt and had dark brown hair. The closer she got to me, the slower time seemed to move. I could feel the space in between seconds growing further and further. She had no eyes so far as I could tell but I could feel her looking rigiht through me. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, though: I’m not really sure how to describe it, but I didn’t sense any malice on her part. She followed me into a barren, muddy field. The sky was overcast but the clouds seemed to move way too fast. I don’t really remember much after that.
Anyways, I was able to successfully complete the treatment for the trailer today. It only took me an hour or so actually, which really begs the question why I struggled with it so much over the weekend. Whatever. In any case, it’s done: now it’s time for me to start producing the actual content. Going over the list of contents as well as last week’s entries, I realise I never actually worked on implementing the bivouac, so I guess I’ll start with that tomorrow.
Haolun came and stayed over last night, which is why I didn’t make an entry yesterday. We watched Her, and then talked a lot about Maria. Or really, I just talked a lot about her. I find it pretty pathetic honestly that I still think about her so often and with such acute emotion as well. Nobody should think about anything – especially another person – so long with such little sense of commitment to decision, let alone action. Well, I suppose I made my choice a a while ago.
I didn’t get nearly enough progress done this weekend on the treatment for the trailer. I guess that’s the first thing I have to work on starting tomorrow (or later today when I wake up). In terms of visuals, I think I’ll start working on heating up and eating rations. If I can get the entire process for preparing and consuming one full ration done by the end of the week, and finish up the trailer treatment, I’ll consider this week a success.
Spent the morning cutting the trailer mix. Ended up using Patti Page’s rendition of “Raindrops” instead of the original: it feels more cinematic, and the female voice works better towards the consistency of the fiction. I’d like to post it but I’ll refrain from doing so until at least the final cut of the trailer is released.
Sawyer and I went to see The Lighthouse tonight. It was excellent on a technical level and one of the best portrayals of the unsettling and often unintentionally funny and pathetic effects of prolonged isolation I’ve seen in film. I have little interest in watching it again but I’m glad I was able to see it in theatres. The sound design in particular gave me a lot to work with in terms of inspiration for my own work. It reminded me positively of Tarkovsky’s separation of audio and visual cues in Stalker, which, however little I think of Tarkovsky in general, is meant anyhow to be a high compliment.
Didn’t actually end up working on the tent animations today, although I was able to implement an interesting new VFX configuration via the bktGlitch shader by blokatt. It’s a remarkably versatile and easy-to-implement solution that basically did exactly what I wanted with very little work or frustration. I’m really satisfied with the way it turned out and it’s definitely added a lot of texture almost immediately to the feeling of the game overall.
I started working on a rough timeline for the trailer, which should give me a pretty clear idea of what things to focus on developing over the next month. Just sitting down to draft it has significantly boosted my sense of motivation in a palpably long-lasting manner. The next few days I have to attend to some personal matters – positive stuff, fortunately – so I won’t really get any opportunities to get too much done in ways of technical implementation but I plan on having the draft for the trailer done by the end of the weekend.
Back on schedule today, mostly. I spent the first half of the day fixing up some residual miscellaneous issues as I noticed them, and then I started working on the rework of the bivouac. I didn’t get much done in terms of actual in-engine work but I got a lot of conceptual planning figured out and I think tomorrow I’m gonna start work implementing the foundations starting with a rudimentary single-pole design. I’m hoping to end with at least a basic ridge tent but we’ll see. It shouldn’t be too different in terms of the animation, although I’ll probably have to get a little creative with the implementation because of the perspective.
For now I’m thinking that maybe the multitool will extend to serve as the major central pole external to the sleeping area, with three paracord guylines staked down, one as a major guide and the other two as tension points. Once the main pole is planted down, the major line is staked as far back as possible from the entrance, completing the tent.
The other solution is to basically plant down the multitool beside a tree, tie a guyline between the two, and then suspend the tarp on the guyline and pin it down to create a low-profile lean-to structure with the excess tarp serving as a built-in groundsheet.
Alternately, I could just have them both…
Either way, I think I’ll have to record a video of myself doing it tomorrow just to get a reference for the angle, because it’s kinda difficult to conceptualise for some reason. Well, hopefully I can get all the animations done tomorrow. I’d count that as good progress.
Stayed up all night last night and went to sleep at noon, ended up sleeping through the entire afternoon basically. Seeing that it’s already almost 0400 and I’m still not even close to sleeping, it seems yet another day passes in which I’ve failed to make even the slightest attempt to improve my sleep schedule…
In any case, it turns out I didn’t exactly fix the issue I thought I fixed yesterday, so I spent some more time actually fixing it for good today. It turns out that inputting a full script with arguments was not accepted by script_execute, so instead of “player_state_switch(light_fire)” I had to create an entire separate script just called “action_light_fire” containing the former script, and then input it into the script_execute. It took me far longer than it should have for me to figure out but at least it’s done. I also implemented the firestarter menu properly so that the player can now choose between different kinds of strikers when starting fires.
Neglected to make an entry last night yet – maybe because – I stayed up until almost sunrise playing video games. I don’t know why. Predictably, I woke pretty late today again. I thought I’d be able to start working on the bivouac but instead I got caught up with some issues regarding the inventory. I didn’t take into account for some reason when I was building it that using an item meant that the player would actually enter a new state so I had to
basically
restructure the entire thing. That took all afternoon but now the inventory should work as it’s supposed to moving forward. Hopefully tomorrow I can start work on the bivouac. I think I might have to redo the animation for that as well…
Every time I enter the date I find myself astonished by just how quickly time slips away. I guess it’s one of those things you just don’t notice until it’s already too late to do anything about it. The next time I look, maybe the year will already be over…
Anyways, there’s no use dwelling on it too much.
I spent most of my working hours today preparing the #screenshotsaturday post, which involved mixing the audio for the lighter and addressing a whole lot of unexpected and annoying bugs that I didn’t foresee. There’s not much use going into it because frankly I don’t even remember what most of them were, just that they were incredibly frustrating to fix. The implementation as a whole is still really underwhelming, both for digging the fire pit and lighting the fire: the animations are unacceptably rough and the process overall just feels really clunky and doesn’t feel good. I’m gonna spend some time tomorrow touching up on the most obvious bugs – mainly related to inconsistent disengaging after the lighting animation as a result of shitty unorganised code on my part (what else is new) – but after that I’m just gonna leave it for the long list, and move on to something else. The other firestarting equipment, maybe, and then after that, food…
I’ve also decided to start writing some public posts about various mechanics and their implementations. My reasons for this are twofold: first, to give potential audiences a taste of the levels of technical complexity the game operates at, which is a good few steps above the vast majority of other games; and second, to start (hopefully) showcasing the more mechanical systems of the game (including aforementioned levels of technicality complexity) and how much it differs from traditional survival-type experiences. I also imagine it’ll help me stay focused through the duration between posts, which I’m planning, at least for now, to be roughly biweekly (or every two #screenshotsaturdays). We’ll see about that, though. The first post will be about firestarting, and I’m targeting a release for next Saturday…
Actually managed to implement the lighter today as I was supposed to do yesterday, and I recorded the audio for it as well although I didn’t clean up, let alone mix any of the tracks so that’ll have to wait until tomorrow (or more accurately later today, although hopefully not too much later).
I also introduced some pretty significant reworks to the way the interface system: the action menu can now only be opened when the player is idle, sitting, or walking, and will automatically close upon the selection of any action. I mainly decided to rework it that way to address an otherwise annoying bug that allowed the player to essentially cancel out of any animation by opening the menu and switching to another state, as well as a lesser (but still annoying) UI delay where the list of available actions would only change once the player completed an action. Additionally, the player can now hold down the interact key to perform repetitive actions such as building fires or digging, instead of having to repeatedly press the interact key.
Spent some time with Haolun last night, and he stayed over. We tried out a new diner – the Majestic – which was pretty good and the waitress was nice and then we stayed up until almost dawn talking about girls like we were still in high school or something. Our voices drifted through the darkness across the length of the room and when we stopped speaking the sound of the wind whipping against the window frame cushioned the silence with a comfortable hum. It was pleasant in a way I haven’t experienced in some time.
Despite the very basic and straightforward nature of my task as described yesterday – the implementation of the lighter framework into the main gameplay – I somehow failed completely at implementing it and accomplished basically nothing today. I just paced around in a state of elevated energy listening to the new Taylor Swift album and thinking about the pacing of the trailer. It’s gotten remarkably cold lately, and it’s always colder inside my house than it is outside. I didn’t even get an entry in for Inktober, either. Tomorrow, I’ll actually get something done.
Spent some time with Aurora this afternoon, and then worked on the mechanics for the lighter. It works very well, and is basically finished: now all I have to do is integrate it into the main workflow and it should be ready. That should take very little time and effort tomorrow. After that, I can start working on other firestarting gear, or on new biomechanics for digestion. Either way, I feel like I made good progress today.
No in-engine work today, but I got the animation done for sparking and igniting the disposable lighter. I think the spark and flame effects could use a bit more touch-up – the animation on them is a bit awkward right now in terms of the pacing – but otherwise I’m feeling pretty good about them. Implementing them into the game once they’re done shouldn’t be difficult at all: I’ll need to create a new UI element for it as well as a randomiser for the probability, but other than that, the actual fire pit assembly is basically already done. I hope it goes as smoothly as I’ve just written it…
Didn’t get much done of anything at all, although last night (technically this morning, since it was like 0400) I finally implemented the rope, which ended up looking a whole lot better than I originally planned. It does use verlet integration after all, although the solution is frankly rather inelegant. Oh, well. You can’t always get things working the exact way you want them.
Tomorrow I should really get back to work proper, back to the regular schedule. I haven’t decided yet what to work on… maybe I should finally get the firestarting done. Or maybe eating / cooking…?
Continued work on the rappelling, including a new animation for planting the anchor point, and improved audio overall. I still haven’t figured out what I’m gonna do about the rope, it’s really been frustrating me. I looked into more dynamic verlet-based solutions but honestly I don’t feel great about them. Well, I guess I’ll give it a try after all…
Successfully submitted the past two weeks’ of work for #screenshotsaturday, and cleaned up the animation and sounds for rappelling a bit. The volume on the audio still needs to be mixed a bit better I think, and there’s obviously still no rope: but it turned out better than I expected and I’m honestly still a bit surprised that I was able to implement it with any success at all. I’ll probably spend some time tomorrow attempting the rope and cleaning up any residual jaggedness, but I’m looking forward to starting work on something new next week.
I’ve started another watch-through of GTO with Kristina and Staoue! They’re working through the manga as well, and hopefully once we’re done we’ll be able to get the live-actions in as well.
Spent most of the day fiddling around with carabiners and compression straps trying to mix audio for the rappelling. I’ve got the clip-in and ascender motor sounds finished, although they still sound a bit rough to me; all that’s left in terms of sounds are the clip-out and landing, which shouldn’t be too bad. I think I can get those done in an hour or two, and then it’s a matter of animating a rope and fixing up as best I can the shadows (or lack thereof…) on the descent… that should get me through tomorrow. I haven’t posted anything public in some time, so hopefully this is able to serve as a decent segue into a recovery.
Martin and I finished watching GTO today. Aside from the spinoff prequel, which we’re going to watch tomorrow hopefully, we’ve now seen every iteration of it it – 1998, 2014 and now the anime, all specials included. It’s been quite an experience, to say the least. This is the second time I’ve watched through all of it now and my life has changed significantly since last I saw it, which was during my second year of withdrawal from the world in university. I feel considerably more motivated and purposeful now. Nonetheless though not only has GTO retained its power but I think I feel even more moved now than I did the first time watching it, being able to recognise in it things I couldn’t see before. The Yoshikawa-Anko arc in particular moved us both to tears. It makes me long for the days of my youth. I feel filled with a sense of profound optimism and confidence now in myself and my friends. I hope I’m able to channel it productively into my work and interactions with others in the days to come. I hope I don’t lose sight of it too soon.
Rappelling has now been implemented although the sprite positioning is pretty off currently, and I’ve yet to implement an actual rope. I suspect that’ll take up basically all of tomorrow, I still haven’t decided how I’m gonna handle the rope: either as a complex static sprite, or as a physics object – or as a combination of both. If it’s the latter I’ll have to look into verlet integration probably which is again something I’m very much not looking forward to working with. I’ll also have to record some audio for it…
For some unfathomably stupid reason I tried testing out the rappelling method Avery uses today by doing a controlled descent from my roof. The technique involves only a rope, without a harness, and it was… painful, to say the least. It’d be much more painful for her as well since she’s got so much skin exposed where the rope would be making contact with her body. For the sake of her skin and my sanity when it comes to spriting, I’ve just elected to give her a mechanised rope ascender instead…
Skipped a post again yesterday. By the time I realised I’d missed it, it was already 3am; it would’ve been too late anyways. Well, today was more productive! I finally finished the rappelling animation, or rather, the most difficult part of it. I could feasibly implement it tonight but I don’t want to work on this anymore for right now. I can’t believe this shit has taken up almost two entire weeks of work at this point… once I’m done with it this weekend I’ll really have to start working in double-time to catch up. Hopefully it’ll be worth it, although I’m not feeling so sure about it anymore. Well, if nothing else comes of it, now I know how to rappel down a drop using only a rope in at least three different configurations.
Felt a bit worse today than the days before, although I suppose it’s been somewhat of a steady decline in mood over the entire weekend. I woke up late once again and had some difficulty getting out of bed, but ultimately I was able to begin working on the animations for rappelling as promised, although it turns out they’re even more difficult than I originally imagined. Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit more productive, but I’ll take what I can get for now…
I haven’t opened GameMaker since Friday night. Not that I feel unmotivated or anything: it’s just that the thought of having to work on the rappelling animations is really off-putting currently. I know I said yesterday that I’d work on them today, but… I don’t think that’s gonna be happening any time soon. Tomorrow though, I’ll have to start working again, no matter what…
I failed to make a post yesterday both because I was too tired and because I actually accomplished nothing of worth yesterday. The same can be said of today, I suppose, although today Sawyer and I went to see Joker. I’ll keep my thoughts here brief (for now) but it was quite moving and overall I felt that the film was able to capture a very specific kind of very raw emotionality that few other films have really managed to touch. It definitely not only lived up to expectations, but exceeded them in many ways. It does a great job not only revisiting the origins of an often-incomprehensible character in a very believably tragic and even sympathetic context; but completely reframing the pivotal deaths of the Wayne family as well, which heretofore has always been seen as an unbelievably tragic incident but in Joker it comes off as almost deserved, if not outright justified. It’s definitely one of the best films I’ve seen that’s come out in recent years, if not the best.
Otherwise, though, I got absolutely no work done whatsoever. I didn’t accomplish most of my goals for this week – those being completing the functions of the multitool – nor did I successfully even begin to implement abseiling, as I got too caught up in the actual environmental work. I’m thinking that, instead of taking my day of rest tomorrow, I’ll work instead since I haven’t really worked on anything these past few days.
A pretty productive day. I woke up early – or, more accurately, at the time I usually should wake up, although lately I’ve been waking up (and going to sleep) much later for some reason – to an unexpectedly cold and rainy day. I spent the morning working on implementing the final water effects as described yesterday: splashes and ripples for walking and raindrops, as well as more balanced audio. I achieved all of those although I didn’t get an opportunity (or rather, I didn’t see the need to) implement the water depth; I thought about it for a bit and it’s a lot more involved than I care to deal with at the current moment.
I have to restrict player actions at some point while they’re in the water so what I’m thinking is that maybe I’ll just create an entirely new sprite for when the player is in the water. That’ll consist of four variations (not including the pack variations): entering, wading, picking things up, and exiting. I don’t think I’ll allow the player to take the pack off while they’re in the water as that would be idiotic in reality, and the multitool is also not really functional in any meaningful sense. I think I’ll also have to implement drinking from the canteen and filling it up, but that should be very straightforward. So, all in all: six pairs of animations, to a total of twelve. I think I’ll get to that tomorrow. I also have to work on the rappelling stuff at some point too…
While working on my Inktober entry today (which was supposed to be of Twitch’s elite Maquis set) GameMaker encountered some kind of bug when I tabbed out of the window which overrode about an hour’s worth of progress. After several moments of impotent frustration I decided to just do a completely different subject instead of trying to salvage the old one. Honestly I like the final version – a portrait of Mercedes de Costa – better than what I’d initially had planned.
I’ve begun working on the cliffside scene proper now, and started by adding some tall trees, which feel more appropriate to the geography and come in two variations: a single shorter tree and a small cluster of taller, thinner ones.
I also finally got around to fixing the issues with the water effect by individually drawing each object instead of the entire application surface to the reflection, which gives me a lot more control on top of eliminating the weird positioning that previously plagued the effect. Now all that’s really left to do re: the water is to add ripples for walking, as well as rain. I also need to turn down the gain on the footstep audio for walking through water, as it’s disproportionately loud, but that should be very easy and straightforward. Lastly, I’m thinking about adding an effect that simulates the depth of water, although I’m not really sure how I’ll begin doing that, or if it’s even worth the time. I think I’ll work on all of those water FX tomorrow, and hopefully if I’m able to finish, I’ll finally get to work on the animations for rappelling, which I hope to be able to show off this Saturday.
The first day of October has come and gone without incident. Probably for the best, I reckon. I worked a bit more on the cliffside although, judging by the most common reactions to it, I think that I’ll have to finish up the actual rappelling mechanics for the concept to really become legible. I’ll start working on the animations tomorrow and, if I can get them finished, I’ll run a mockup and see how it looks. Part of me feels I should be working on more critical mechanics and systems – there are so many things that aren’t built yet – but hopefully I can wrap this up sooner rather than later. I’ll commit to this until tomorrow: if I can’t get it looking right by the end of tomorrow I’m moving on to something more concrete and important (most likely firestarting).
Speaking of which though, this month, as an extension of Inktober, as well as in the interest of preparing for the trailer, I plan on focusing more on visual-oriented stuff: new animations, new locations, etc. It’ll be good both for output and for maintaining a steady sense of tangible progress on a day-to-day basis, as I’m beginning to get real tired of seeing the same two or three rooms all the time (as I’m sure others are as well). By the end of this month I plan on getting at the very least the first ring of the world map finished in its entirety. It seems pretty daunting at the moment but I figure if I dedicate a weekend or something to producing a bunch of environmental assets, the rest of the work should fit fairly nicely into a span of four weeks so long as I’m able to maintain a steady pace and not get distracted. Speaking of distractions though, Breakpoint comes out in two days…
The month’s already over, and I barely registered its passage. I can’t tell if that’s a good or bad thing. It’s probably neither. Well, October’s here now, which means that Inktober’s starting up, and I decided to commit to it again this year (I did it last year as well, which feels so far away that I had to actually go back and check my Instagram account just to make sure that it was in fact last year and not 2017). I’m settling for fast, easy sketches this time around – so not at all that dissimilar to last year actually – although coming up with new things to draw each time is gonna be a pain the ass, I can already tell. Well, whatever.
I started working today on a new background for a cliffside. Originally I was planning on starting the animations for anchoring and rappelling but then I realised I needed an environmental context anyways and it’d be good to showcase so I decided to set that aside for after I’m done with this. The perspective is a bit tricky on this one and while normally I’d have been able to finish at least just the initial draft in an afternoon or so like I was expecting it ended up taking a whole lot longer and I still barely have the foreground figured out, let alone the background stuff (which needs to be rendered in parallax, but that’s a lesser concern at the moment). I’m gonna put in some real heavy hours tomorrow making up for today’s relative lack of progress.
